13. Emotional reactions and the language of virtues and vices – 37 pages

Sometime in November, 2008

(Warning:  The following reflection is heavily philosophical.)

    To dramatize trust-issues, I emphasized the difference between emotional reactions and vulnerable self-revelations.  And to show that each emotional reaction encoded a long-practiced judgment and strategy, I noted that we acquire a repertoire of emotional reactions through the process of socialization and that, in a concrete situation, a hidden judgment moves us to choose the specific reaction that promotes an equally hidden agenda.

    As I sought to lay bare the dynamics involved, I started reading Pope Benedict XVI's Encyclical on Hope, which echoed the traditional characterization of faith, hope and charity as theological virtues.  As I read on, I realized that I could never give a sermon on hope (or on charity, for that matter.)  But I also recalled how often I have preached on trust (and love).  And that realization led me to compare the dynamics of emotional reactions with the dynamics of virtues and vices and to contract actions informed by virtues with interactions which promote deepening intimacy.

Virtues

    The case for virtues can be easily made.  Our actions are formative of the sort of person we become, and practice makes perfect.  An acquired virtue confers control over deeply rooted tangles tapped by change happenings.  And instead of reacting erratically or impulsively, we become reliable members of a community.  And the illusion that virtuous or vicious actions are spontaneous fostered by long-practice suggests that the reactions are therefore natural.

    To address the issue of empowerment, I merely note that the meaning of any word, including words describing virtues and vices, depends on its use in a form of life.  From this perspective, the power over tangled feelings conferred by long-practice differs radically from the freedom to respond creatively when we are at cross-purposes with loved ones, and reliability is a pale substitute for a creative fidelity.

    These differences lead me to revisit the differences in a form of life generated by incarnational theology I embrace and the form of life which Pope Benedict XVI derives from the transcendentalist theology he embraces so consistently.  Most recently, I was fascinated by the interplay between the Pope's Encyclical on hope and his diatribes against the secularization of western culture.  Again and again, the Pope locates moral discourse between an objective moral order, on the one hand, and a lapse into a sterile moral relativity and/or a self-indulgent subjectivity, on the other.  Intriguingly, this way of framing the issue is foreign to the Hellenic philosophical tradition whose contributions to western culture he acknowledges.  In its earliest stage, this tradition set in motion a process referred to as "the disenchantment of nature, the de-sacralization of society, and the twilight of the gods and goddesses".  In place of the sacralization of society, it adopted a metaphor which depicted the city as the cradle and crucible of culture and civilization and fostered a two-fold commitment, one, to respectful dialogue and, two, to a dialectically structured inquiry designed to ensure the ultimate triumph of one belief-system or one perspective over all competitors.  At no time, however, did it ground moral discourse in an objective moral order inscribed in nature.

    In his Regensburg Address, the Pope did embrace the dynamics of an engagement ruled by a dialectically structured dialogue.  Whenever he presumes to speak as the guardian of western culture, however, his utterances fall victim to the way that the bitter controversies between Catholics and Protestants at the dawn of the Modern Era replaced a dialectically structured inquiry with a polemically structured discourse.  Concretely, the enduring rule of this misplaced debate blinds him to the fact that the philosophical arguments designed to ground moral judgments in Aquinas' natural law theory speak only to the choir.

    But even some Thomists are aware that the attempt to ground moral discourse in a objective moral order is doomed to failure.  To save the authority of Aquinas, they advocate instead the distinction between virtues and vices which Aquinas inherited from the naturalism encoded in Aristotle's famous "middle way."  To frame this method for analyzing traditional moral notions, Aristotle interwove his metaphysical vision of an hierarchically and teleologically structured universe and a purported demonstration of the existence of an unmoved Mover.  In his baptism of Aristotelian metaphysics, Aquinas supposed that his famous Five Ways demonstrated that a rational and purposive Creator inscribed his moral will in a teleologically and hierarchically structured Book of Nature which all rational beings could read without interpretation.  In this context, since the "middle way" emerged as a plausible way for analyzing moral notions fruitfully, it could be exploited without the argument for an objective moral order inscribed in nature by a rational and purposive Creator. 

        (Today, some Thomists try to justify Aquinas' synthesis of this natural law theory and the language of virtues and vices as a legitimate exposure of an inseparable relationship between theory and practice.  In this vein, those among them who are aware of schools of sociology suggest that the natural law theory fulfills the promise of Structuralism, while the language of virtues and vices satisfies criteria designed to fulfill the promise of Functionalism by showing how specific practices are either conducive to or disruptive of the moral quest.)

    Thus, in the dialogue among Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, however, the empirical focus of Aristotle's `middle way' reformulated the insight encoded in the Socratic method and the idealism of Plato's ethical theory.  The Socratic method promised that a dialectically structured dialogue would involve moral agents in a search for clear and distinct moral notions.  Since conditions of life in the city were constantly changing, that search would be unending, but it would nonetheless promote a self-knowledge that enhanced self-mastery.  But when Socrates was commanded to drink the hemlock by civil authorities, Plato became uneasy with an inquiry which could never yield definitive judgments.  To justify the imposition of closure on endless questioning, he posited a realm of timeless, clear, distinct, yet interpenetrating ideal Forms.

    Here, we do well to remember that the way a question is formulated determines, to a large extent, what will count as an answer and what will count as evidence for the answer.  Plato's formulation bears witness to his fascination with form and an unrecognized desire to tame the rupture of orality's illusory promise of immediate presence, fullness and totality inherent in the interiorization of literacy.  This desire is inscribed in his suggestion that we remember a prior existence in the realm of forms.  And as his Allegory of the Cave suggests, he hoped that the use of reason to analyze the flux of experience would yield glimpses of those ideal Forms.

    In marked contrast, Aristotle's "middle way" began and remained in the middle.  In short, it assumed that everyday experiences of constantly changing conditions of life were distinctively human experiences, not flawed instantiations of interpenetrating ideal Forms.  (That assumption saved him from the trivialization of moral discourse implicit in the distinction between description and evaluation at the center of Hume's insistence that "is" does not imply "ought".)

    As an empirical inquiry, the "middle way" depended on the conception of a final cause developed in Aristotle's categorization of the four causes of change.  To frame this theory of causality, Aristotle located change in a framework of potency and act.  In its application to moral discourse, he asserted that human beings began as potentialities informed by a formal cause which defined them as rational animals and a final cause which governed the journey from the potentiality inherent in human nature to a fulfillment defined as "well-being" (or "whole-being".)  In this context, the language of virtues and vices was designed to show the difference between life-giving and self-destructive responses to concrete situations.  Since the final cause urged individuals to seek self-fulfillment, it was functioned as the god-term in the inquiry.  Consequently, the language of vices framed the positive moral notions by descriptions of practices which obstructed human development because, as either deficient or excessive of the virtue in question, they were brutalizing and dehumanizing.

    In sum, as a literary heir of the Socratic method, Aristotle sensed that a list of virtues could never delineate the path to a fully human existence with precision.  As a compulsive systematizer, however, he was well aware of the need to develop moral notions with testable implications.  But he did not assume that the language of virtues and vices could yield universally binding judgments throughout the ages.  Rather, to use the distinction in question effectively, one had to realize (1) that the understanding of any virtue was inseparable from the understanding of its two opposites and (2) that "well being" functioned as a god-term designed to subject the implications of the language of virtues and vices in the language at hand to the test of everyday experience.  In this context, the use of the "middle way" would presumably indicate what would count as a fully human response by exposing the sort of actions which failed either by excess or by deficiency.

        (Generosity provides a clear example of the way this method works.  Aristotle believed that humans are naturally and inescapably social beings.  He would have embraced the dictum, "No man is an island."  In his analysis of friendship, he assumed that such a participatory existence might call for a gratuitous generosity in good times as well as a willingness to share one's goods with friends in need.  But the application of the "middle way" implies that a sharing which leaves one destitute (and therefore vulnerable) is clearly excessive, while the self-centered practices encompassed under greed are clearly deficient.  As a result, it shows that generous individuals enhance their lives by their gracious involvement with friends and fellow citizens, but extravagant actions which violate the over-arching virtue of moderation are clearly vices, as are miserly practices which detach individuals from full participation in the life of a moral community.)

       

    To the extent that I am a contextualist, I acknowledge debts to Aristotle (1) for his empirical subversion of the seductive power of Platonic idealism, (2) for his insistence that moral discourse involves a constant search for linguistic formulations capable of evoking a longing for a fully human existence by finite individuals immersed in contingent historical events, and (3) for his use of "well-being" as a god-term capable of generating testable implication of any language of virtue and vice designed to perpetuate the status quo.  In this context, I begin with analyses of the many distinctive forms of life incorporated in everyday English.  But my search is primarily concerned with the analysis of a language which gives voice to a longing for a uniquely personal existence.  And the purpose at the center of the form of life which transforms this longing into a realizable quest differs radically from a concern with self-actualization which endows human nature with a teleological structure which urges individuals to move from potentiality to act.

    In Aristotle's system, an urge (rather than a longing) works with a necessity of nature.  I work instead from a reading of the story of Adam and Eve which traces the longing for a uniquely personal existence to an eruptive self-consciousness which offers glimpses of one's unfathomable depths and mysterious freedom and, in so doing, evokes the longing also for deepening person-to-person involvements with loved ones.  And to supplement that understanding, I echo the Existentialists who centered human existence in an intentionally structured consciousness rather than a teleologically structured nature.

 

        (COMMENTARY:  To belabor the obvious:  As an empiricist, Aristotle rejected Plato's proposal that glimpses of an eternal, changeless realm of ideal Forms could accredit definitive moral judgments.  In effect, while Plato assumed that reason provided a detached (god-like) perspective on language and experience, Aristotle insisted that all inquiries must "begin in the middle".  Nonetheless, he inserted Plato's forms in the (pure) potency of matter in a way that legitimated his compulsion to define distinct species in term of genus and specific differences.  In this context, he described human beings as "rational animals".  On his part, Aquinas adopted this definition of human nature, but traded on the authority of Plato's argument that the rule of reason over unruly passions and desires offered the only possible escape from a lapse into a brutish existence.

        Centuries later, Hobbes, Locke and Kant sought to wrest authority from Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, but they did not critique the biases inherent in the supposition that human beings are rational animals.  Clearly, this understanding of the workings of human nature played a pivotal role in the contract theories of society forged by Hobbes and Locke, as did metaphors of individuality which were literally inconceivable in Aquinas's metaphysical system.

        Thus, to endow his contract-theory of society with authority, Hobbes's retelling of Augustine's (and Aquinas') violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve retained the Aristotelian distinction between nature and reason.  To legitimate his secularization of Augustine's myth of pure beginnings, he envisioned the primordial state of nature as a state of scarcity populated by humans whose unrestrained passions and desires threatened to produce a perpetual war of all against all.  To justify his passion for order, he used the Scholastic belief that reason could compel universal assent and consent to its dictates to support the insistence that a totalitarianism offered the only escape from this brutish existence.  By definition, his insistence that a social contract which irrevocably anointed a dictator as the sole authority in the social, political and moral dimensions of human existence offered the only escape from chaos rested on the assumption that reason provided a detached perspective which individuals could occupy interchangeably.

        (Note well, to this day, Hobbes' myth continues to lend a spurious legitimacy to rhetorics used to legitimate totalitarian forms of government by playing on fears of a war of all against all.  In every instance, these rhetorics play on the fears of those who are willing to embrace a dictator whose rhetoric first dramatizes their fears and then asks them to grant him (or her) the power to allay them.)

    In sum, the argument used by Hobbes to endow his contract theory with authority supplemented the traditional supposition that reason must rule passions and desires with a metaphor which implied that, without the rule of reason, passion and desire would provoke a perpetual war of all against all.  To counter the totalitarian implications of Hobbes' understanding of the workings of reason, Locke envisioned a primordial state of nature populated by reasonable individuals endowed with an inalienable right to freedom.  In later centuries, anarchists exploited Locke's assumptions for wildly different purposes.  (In my youth, I was endlessly fascinated by Eamon Hennesey's argument for anarchism:  "Why have laws?  The good don't need them, and the bad don't observe them.")  But Locke recognized the need for some form of government.  Using the detachment inherent in the traditional conception of reason as a tool, not a master, he asserted that human beings were motivated by enlightened self-interest.  With this theory of motivation in place, he could then argue that self-interested individuals could avoid submission to forms of government which violated their inalienable right to freedom by limiting the power of government to the power needed to protect their freedom and to enforce freely entered social (economic) contracts.

        (In the on-going dialogue of text with text, Hume offered a far more radical critique of the rationalist tradition.  As the champion of experimentalism, he insisted that, because conditions were constantly changing, we cannot be certain that any experience will have the same consequences as previous experiences in similar states of affairs.  But this critique, though it awoke Kant from a self-confessed "dogmatic slumber", did not sound the death-knell of rationalism.  To recover the power of reason to compel consent without ignoring Hume's critique, Kant composed his monumental Critique of Pure Reason.  The structure of this text is centered in a distinction between nature and reason which acknowledges that the use of "reason" is in no way natural.  To dramatize that discovery, Kant drew heavily on the conceptual framework embodied in Newtonian physics.  In so doing, he implicitly acknowledged that the conception of reason he espoused awaited the arrival of Newton on the scene.  And to justify that conception, he argued that it offered the only possible way that human beings could process experience comprehensively and precisely.

       (Kant's argument incorporated Hume's critique in an intriguing way.  Newton was confident that his laws of motion enabled him to understand and master the workings of gravity, but he also confessed that we could never know what gravity was.  In the same vein, Kant insisted that we can never know "the thing-in-itself", including our own tangled depths.  As a result, when he applied this conception of reason to moral issues, he could argue that it enabled human beings to understand how to become free by subjecting passion, desire and social conventions to the rule of reason, though it could not confer an in-depth knowledge of the internal turmoil which would otherwise enslave us.

        (In the use he made of the distinction between nature and reason in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, therefore, Kant incorporated Locke's supposition that individuals are naturally endowed with an inalienable right to freedom in the conception of the autonomous individuals which emerged as the god-term in his ethical theory.  But his insistence that becoming free required an acquired ability to harness passion and desire to moral ends used Aristotle' distinction between potency and act to frame Rousseau's romantic insistence that individuals are made unique by nature, not by God, and that they are therefore creators of their own unique existences.  And finally, it echoed (1) the biblical vision which depicted human beings as individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom who seldom embrace a journey into the unknown fully and (2) the prophetic insight which reveals that moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion.

        (The appeal of the conception of the autonomous individual can be traced to the way that it integrates the interrogatory stance at the center of the fictive voice of reason, the eruptive self-consciousness articulated in the story of Adam and Eve, and the diverging restructurings of thought encoded in Descartes' myth of pure beginnings and in the narrative structure of the stories which the ancient Israelites used to process Israel's historical experience.  As an offspring of the critical strand in the rationalist tradition, the conception implies that human beings are unique individuals who, because they cannot predict or control the consequences of actions in the constantly changing conditions of life, must learn how to master the natural necessity inherent in desires and passions and the conventionality of social norms and practices if they are to become free and to live with personal integrity.  In short, each experience of inner turmoil is a new beginning, and to escape from that turmoil, they must use reason to lend authority to the categorical imperative which dictates an original and creative response to the situation as one perceives it.  Reason, then, functions as both a tool for discovery and a compelling power.  On both counts, judgments which pretend to lay bare the presence or workings of a purportedly objective moral order are clearly immoral;  the compassion celebrated by Hume is at best amoral;  virtues are immoral practices conducive to the realization or perpetuation of some social order or form of life;  and finally, since love violates the demand for impartiality implicit in the detachment inherent in the use of reason, the responses it inspires are inherently immoral.

       (To follow Aristotle's insight that moral inquiries involve a process of discovery, Kant formulated two maxims designed to function in the manner of Newton's Laws of Motion.  For our purposes, the maxim which decrees that rational beings must always be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means, is most relevant.  Thus, though passion also operates with a natural necessity, desire provides a clear example of the way that this maxim was supposed to contribute to the process by which an autonomous individual becomes free.  Left to operate without restraint, desire motivates individuals to use one another for self-gratification.  The maxim promises to identify deviations from this ideal in the same way that Newton's First Law of Motion identifies deviations from straight-line motion, and the identification of the deviation enables moral agents to master the disturbance provoked by desire.  On its part, the identification in question may not foster an understanding of one's tangled depths, but the mastery it confers would enable one to act as a free and autonomous individual.  And to close the hermeneutical circle, the use of reason which one must respect in oneself and others lends moral authority to the categorical imperatives which one dictates to oneself.

        (The challenge of Kant's literary construction of the conception of reason to a language of virtues and vices is obvious.  Categorical imperatives dictate the performance of original and creative responses in a state of affairs defined by Descartes' myth of pure beginnings.  As a moral notion, a specific virtue calls for repeat performances whose apparent spontaneity belies the repetition required to acquire it.  Virtues, then, insidiously suppress the creative abilities of unique individuals in favor of practices designed to perpetuate or enhance some form of life derived from the metaphor of power and judgment.

    Though I take Kant's challenge seriously, I nonetheless suggest that Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals provides as a clear an example of a systematic abuse of a language especially invented for that purpose as Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  Nonetheless, if I had to choose between the two, I would unhesitatingly choose Kant's analysis.  Quite obviously, it bears witness to a passionate concern for the individual.  In this vein, his use of internal turmoil as the experience which raises moral issues echoes the prophetic insistence that the cries of the oppressed, marginalized and silenced voice moral imperatives.  On both these counts, the purpose of the form of life advocated by Thomists (including Pope Benedict XVI) is sadly deficient.

    My critique of Aquinas and Kant can be easily stated.  Aquinas grounded moral discourse in the will of a rational and purposive Creator rather than a God of love.  In so doing, he framed his analysis of moral discourse with a metaphor of power and judgment rather than a metaphor of intimacy.  Kant wove the same metaphor of power and judgment into his abstract conception of the autonomous individual.  Using this conception as the god-term in his system, he offered a sophisticated version of the solipsistic individuals who inhabited the myth of pure beginnings which emerged from the relentless application of the Cartesian methodical doubt.  In so doing, he exposed significant differences between law and command.  But the solipsism at the core of his conception of the autonomous individual denies moral authority to the longing of unique individuals for ever-deepening person-to-person involvements.

An Earlier Version of Aristotle's "Middle Way"

    Aristotle's "middle way" framed the quest for personal "well-being" in the belief that actions motivated by hubris, the desire for a god-like existence, and by unruly passions and desires, the mark of a brute, aborted that quest.  As a herald of "the twilight of the gods and goddesses", he replaced the notion of fate with an emphasis on the necessity of nature.  But he tempered this emphasis with a metaphor which depicted the city as the cradle and crucible of culture, and did so without abandoning entirely the traditional fascination with form and a suspicion of passion and desire evoked by Homer's poignant evocations of the futility of violence in the Iliad.

    To understand the workings of the "middle way",  one must remember that neither Plato nor Aristotle had access to a rich language of human interiority.  On his part, Plato located human motivation in a god-term, eros, which conflated passion and desire, and forged the metaphor of a tri-partite soul to justify his insistence that reason must rule passion and desire.  Moving to the city as "the tri-partite soul writ large", he advocated the rule of philosopher-kings and was willing to endow them with the power of life and death.  Presumably, their judgments would be governed by idealist conventions derived from their contemplation of the realm of Ideal Forms.  On his part, Aristotle used the assumption that human beings are social by nature to reformulate Plato's idealist conventions as naturalist conventions governing empirical inquiries.

    In this context, Plato was the first philosopher of the western literary tradition.  (For many years, I assigned that title to Nietzsche).  Though the language generated by the Hellenic literary tradition had already taken on a life of its own, his predecessors, the pre-Socratics, still lacked fruitful distinctions among language, experience and reality.  In a move that centered philosophical inquiries in these distinctions, Plato posited a realm of interpenetrating ideal Forms which mirrors an enduring text consisting of clear and distinct ideas written in continuous prose.  Moreover, since he introduced this distinction to justify the imposition of closure on endless questioning, he could pretend that judgments which revealed this timeless realm spoke with moral authority.

    In marked contrast, Aristotle's depiction of human beings as rational animals grounded moral inquiries in nature.  To accredit this dubious assumption, Aristotle supplemented the description of human beings as rational animals with the assertion that human beings were also social by nature.  In its own right, this addition entailed a significant departure from the method for analyzing moral issues enshrined in Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

     

        (In passing, I must note that, to many people whom I respect, these historical digressions are meaningless and even irritating.  I willingly confess that much of my writing is self-indulgent.  In this instance, I could not resist the urge to explore the literary conventions woven into Aristotle's assumption that humans are inherently social beings, the metaphor of individuality which justifies Hobbes' insistence that conflict is the inevitable consequences of natural urges to seek pleasure and avoid pain, the Cartesian myth of pure beginnings populated by solipsistic individuals who float above an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivity and objectivity, Kant's abstraction of a conception of the autonomous individual from Descartes' metaphor of individuality, and the even more abstract metaphor of individuality inscribed in Sartre's famous dictum, "Hell is other people." 

        (For my fascination with the workings of literary conventions, I am indebted to Ong's analysis of the transition from orality to literacy as the foundation of western culture and to postmodernist archaeologies of knowledge and genealogies of morals which lay bare the literary origins of the languages which transmit both western culture and the Christian tradition.)

        (In this context, I delight in comparisons between the analyses of the workings of language in the texts of the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Nietzsche and analyses inspired by the foundational stories of the Hebrew narrative tradition and the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets.  These stories laid the foundation for a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, which functioned as a perspective designed to offer glimpses of dynamic interactions between an incomprehensible God and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  In them, no human action can be described as "doing what comes naturally", and a list of virtues and vices would only direct attention away from the longing to probe those unfathomable depths.          (Unfortunately, Christian polemicists tend to invoke select passages in the Judaic-Christian Scriptures to lend biblical warrant to doctrinal formulations.  In effect, they read these stories in ways that reveal more about the purposes of the interpreter than about the revelatory power of stories which have continued to speak to individuals in very different cultures across the ages.  On my part, I read biblical stories as literary gems which frame an empty literary space within which I can endlessly explore the implications of Jesus' command, "Love one another as I have loved you."

       (As a literary composition, the story of Adam and Eve is like a multi-faceted diamond.  Each time I read it, I have new insights into the human condition, on one level, and into the transition from orality to literacy, on another level.  Moreover, I agree with Joe Messina's suggestion that the structure of this story provided the narrative strategy for later stories by the Yahwist concerning God's involvement with Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs.  Regarding these stories, I am intrigued by a reading which suggests that God's grief over Israel is triggered by a difficulty in finding individuals willing to embrace life fully, not by disobedience to a Law which codified practices which were no longer life-giving.  (Harold Bloom, The Book of J.) 

        (In this context, the command to love one another as Jesus loves each of us is central to my critique of the suggestion that faith, hope and charity are theological virtues and the ethical tradition which privileges the virtues of moderation, prudence, courage and wisdom over all others.  That critique is compatible with the way that Aristotle's "middle way" formulates ethical reflection as an empirical inquiry, but it replaces Aristotle's compulsion to categorize with a methodology indebted to Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of everyday languages.           (Wittgenstein's insights were inspired by his disillusionment with the ideal language program and the verification principle embraced by Logical Positivism.  The program rested on the assumption that language is a formal system generated and governed by a logical principle of identity.  Though it took years of tortured reflections, Wittgenstein transformed his disillusionment into an unshakeable confidence that ordinary language serves human purposes better than any ideal language ever could, and that it does so because it consists  of many forms of life, each designed to realize a distinctive purpose.

            (In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein had attempted to set forth the framework for an ideal language capable of presenting the whole of reality transparently.  But once he had completed the project, he realized that such a language could not say anything worth saying.  To supplement the switch from quest for truth to inquiries designed to lay bare the workings of languages conducive to the realization of human purposes, Wittgenstein replaced Logical Positivism's insistence that meaning is limited to bare empirical reference with a metaphor which compared words to ropes woven from many (literary) strands, with no strand running all the way through.  And since these theory-laden words could generate a range of empirically testable implications, they could be woven into metaphors designed to transform longings, insights, inspired guesses and the like into realizable purposes.  In changing conditions of life, every new metaphor initially exceeds its grasp.  If its testable implications bear little fruit, adherents soon lose interest.  But those which generate linguistic formulations capable of showing how a distinctive purpose might be realized are woven into everyday languages.  And as long as language-users continued to value the purpose in question, these languages continue to make them available.

            (Since theory-laden words can be used to realize more than one purpose, they obviously encode many meanings.  Consequently, to counter criticism of his insistence that language is not a formal system, Wittgenstein had to show that his analysis escaped the threat of the Mad Hatter's assertion, "Words mean what I want them to mean!"  To do so, he replaced the focus on reference in the verification principle with a succinct formula:  "The meaning of a word is its use in a form of life."

             ("Love" is a word whose many uses illustrate the critical import of this formula.  In a form of life centered in a commitment to a deepening person-to-person involvement, "I love you" is a performatory utterance which voices a promise of passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions.  In marked contrast, seducers use the same language of love to identify the vulnerabilities of their prey and exploit those vulnerabilities callously.  (Lest I be accused of categorizing unique individuals, I have been painfully (and futilely) involved with too many individuals who, because they embrace seduction as a form of life, use a word enriched by a well-tested form of life for a dehumanizing and depersonalizing purpose.)

            (In the same vein, I note that proponents of a laissez faire Capitalism celebrate greed as a virtue which propels the economic system.  Note well, however, that greed is never effective in promoting person-to-person involvements.)

    To summarize this discussion of Aquinas' debt to Aristotle's  metaphysical system and his language of virtues and vices, I must emphasize that Aquinas' analysis of moral discourse calls for conformity to a hierarchically structured natural, social, political and ecclesiastical order.  In any culture, it voices a call which legitimates practices designed to support the prevailing social, political or economic structures.  As an offspring of the metaphor of power and judgment, it counters the threat of cultural relativity and arbitrary exercises of power, but the cost is prohibitive, since it silences prophetic protests and rationalizes the privileged positions of those at the top of the order.

    In this regard, Aquinas' distinction between the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity) and moral virtues reveals the central role that a distinction between a supernatural and a natural realm played in his system.  I note in passing that this distinction is meaningless in a Christology which asserts that, because the incarnate Word is fully human as well as fully God, the moral will of God is revealed through a language capable of enabling honest searchers to discern the intensely personal ways that the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are involved with them in every event in their journey into the unknown.

    From another perspective, describing charity as a theological virtue objectifies love.  The objectification disguises the violence done to the elusive longing for deepening person-to-person involvements by a categorization grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment.  But the effectiveness of the disguise depends on the validity of a distinction between a natural and a supernatural realm of existence, and that validity cannot withstand analyses which expose the insidious dualism inscribed in the distinction.  Finally, the role of Augustine's harsh doctrine of original sin in the objectification of love is obvious when its supposition that Adam's offspring are inherently self-centered is compared with the longing for deepening person-to-person involvements evoked by the language of love.

    In a less obvious way, the objectification of love centers moral discourse in relationships between and among individuals who are not involved with one another in intensely personal ways.  As a result, it provides an empty literary space for a variety of ethical theories designed to subject these abstract relationships to essentially juridical practices sanctioned by the powers-that-be.  And that is clearly unacceptable.

    Here, the pronouncements by members of the hierarchy concerning homosexuality dramatize the point at issue.  To put the matter mildly, I am outraged by the smugness with which members of the hierarchy characterize homosexuality as an intrinsically disordered state of existence.  To lend moral authority to this judgment, they must pretend that their position in the institutional Church entitles them to speak for God.  And while some among them may temper the harshness of their judgments by pretending that they condemn only sexual activities between homosexuals, not homosexuals themselves, their references to something intrinsically evil expose their homophobia.  Consequently, I make no apologies for accusing them of inflicting unspeakable violence on vulnerable individuals.  To justify my accusation, I need only expose the ways that they use the literary conventions which support Aquinas' ethical theory to absolve themselves of responsibility for the pain they inflict.

    This ethical theory exploits the way that Aristotle's metaphysics endows human nature and the entire natural order with a teleological structure.  That endowment seemed plausible to followers who assumed that a rational and purposive Creator inscribed his moral will in an autonomous Book of Nature.  But the geometrization of the universe indebted to Descartes' critique of Aristotle's world-view exposed the literary origins of the medieval metaphor of the Two Books authored by God reveals that moral judgments grounded in an Aristotelian metaphysics are little more than thinly disguised exemplifications of the will to power so relentlessly exposed by Nietzsche.

    In a less obvious and therefore more insidious way, Aquinas' baptism of Aristotle's vision of a hierarchically structured universe frames the distinction between an autonomous natural order and a supernatural realm of existence.  To this day, an uncritical embrace of this distinction blinds too many Catholic moral theologians to troubling analogies between Luther's insistence that Adam's descendants are inescapably self-centered and their own insistence that homosexual acts are intrinsically evil.  Both Luther's doctrine and their moral judgment depend for their authority on Augustine's violent mis-reading of the story of Adam and Eve.  I.e., both rest on the assumption that Adam's sin disrupted a primordial state of nature.  However, since Luther was primarily concerned with a supposedly severed relationship between Creator and creatures, he was inclined to grant autonomy to the natural order.  And since he was primarily concerned with grounds for a doctrine of justification by faith alone, he added the supposition that Adam's archetypal transgression was imprinted on his offspring in a way that left them utterly and inescapably sinful as a literary foundation for his doctrine of justification by faith alone.

    On their part, Thomists who regard homosexuality as a disordered state of existence must invoke the absurd supposition that Adam's sin disrupted the entire natural order.  Thus, to resolve the problem of suffering, they accept the implications of the refrain in Genesis, 1.  "And God saw that it was good."  But this unqualified refrain forces them to trace homosexuality to the doctrine of original sin which Augustine extracted from the story of Adam and Eve.  And they take this forced attribution to an even less tenable reading of the story when they transform their contention that homosexuality disrupts a teleologically structured sexuality (i.e., a structure ordered toward the procreation of children) into a judgment that homosexuality is an intrinsically evil orientation and into frantic efforts to oppose the legitimation of same-sex marriages in the social arena.

        At one time, many Catholic moral theologians tried to "save their theory" by suggesting that homosexuality is freely chosen or culturally induced.  From an empirical stand-point, that option is no longer open.  As a result, they must conclude (1) that what they describe as a disordered state of existence is the result of original sin and (2) that this orientation is both unnatural and intrinsically evil.  By implication, though heterosexuals may undergo transformations, gays and lesbians are inescapably sinful, in the manner depicted by Luther.

    I am morally horrified by these rhetorics.

        (Aside:  I do not reject references to an original sin entirely, I insist that distinctions transmitted by everyday language can be used to blind the powers-that-be to the violence three inflict on those who are powerless in the cultures they are determined to perpetuate.  For this reason, I have always been interested in exposing the ways that violence is transmitted through the ages.  But when I subject Augustine's version of the doctrine of original sin to the test of experience, the test confirms that we sin because we are wounded, not because we are inherently self-centered.

        In this vein, the reflections on heterosexual and homosexual priests in a homily delivered by Archbishop Levada, the man selected by Pope Benedict to replace himself as the grand Inquisitor, make no sense apart from Augustine's version of the doctrine of original sin.  In that homily, the Archbishop asserted that homosexual priests could not present the image of Christ fully.  From an experiential perspective, that assertion is blatant nonsense.  In my fifty one years as a priest, I have encountered far too many heterosexual Bishops and priests who inflict unspeakable violence on individuals who trust them, and I have grieved with many homosexual priests who foster encounters with Jesus, the Wounded Healer, despite the harsh judgments on them by a homophobic hierarchy.

        In the case of these heterosexual men, ordination quite obviously did not imprint on them a discernible image of Jesus, transform them into channels of Christ's love to others, or elevate them to a supernatural realm of existence.  Indeed, if a small sampling of experiences could incline me to share Luther's belief that we are inescapably corrupt, my direct and indirect experiences with priests would suffice.  Far too many of them have never undergone a conversion which enables them to be involved vulnerably and respectfully with anyone.  In marked contrast, I have been and am involved with homosexual priests whose lives are obviously informed by Jesus' command, "Love one another as I have loved you."  They are immensely compassionate men who are totally committed to Jesus, the way and the truth and the life. 

        As a result, my awareness of the pain inflicted on men who are truly instruments of God's love for wounded individuals has often raised an anguished question:  "How can I continue to function as a priest when Popes, Cardinals, Bishops and curial officials expect me to echo the party line?  I cannot, and I will not agree that homosexuality is an intrinsically evil orientation.  (And I would also witness the exchange of vows between homosexuals who longed to make a permanent commitment to loving one another as Jesus loves each of them.  But that is another issue.) 

        In my times of anguish, the witness of the homosexual priests I admire inspires me to remain actively involved in an institutional Church in ways that resist the demands of those in authority that I mindlessly repeat their immoral judgments.  And on a broader canvas, when I hear the cries of pain which these judgments inflict on some of the most committed members of the Catholic community, I hear once again the reminder that there is no way through the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence except through it.  In that vein, the journey of faith that I share with these priests (and with members of Catholic communities who welcome me warmly, flaws and all) reassures me that members of the hierarchy and curial officials appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI are not the Church.)

         Without apology, therefore, I suggest that the pronouncements of men whose only claim to authority is their position in a hierarchically structured institution encode a hidden will to power.  And I freely confess that this conviction is indebted to the moral passion voiced by Nietzsche and Sartre.  Since the analyses of experience advanced by both these authors rely on a reading code derived from a metaphor of power and judgment, they analyze experience in ways that I find abhorrent.  Nonetheless, their re-readings of the western literary tradition awakened me the dogmatic slumber induced by my indoctrination into a theology framed by a metaphor of power and judgment.  In particular, I found myself agreeing with Nietzsche's relentless exposure of the dishonesty of moralists who clothed the will to power inherent in their judgments with the mantle of reason.  In the final analysis, I realized that he had succeeded in showing that "the emperor had no clothes".

        In the same vein, Sartre challenged me to analyze my everyday experiences from a perspective indebted to Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Husserl.  As I wrestled with his claim that passionate person-to-person involvement inevitably degenerated into sado-masochistic interaction, I came to realize that, in his Being and Nothingness, Sartre used a phenomenological analysis of experience to delineate the moral issues encountered by conscious beings driven by a longing for an authentically unique and profoundly personal existence.  To present love as an impossible passion, he focused his penetrating analyses of the formative power of the languages we acquire in childhood on the hidden judgments and strategies encoded in emotional reactions.  As I became increasingly intrigued by his insights, I began to subject my own emotional reactions to the critical apparatus encoded in his depiction of human existence as a project to be God.  (In this metaphor, Sartre echoed Augustine's cry, "Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they will not rest until they rest in you.")

        Later, when I compared the role played by repertoires of emotional reactions with the role assigned to virtues and vices in pre-modern cultures, I was surprised by the discovery that there were no significant structural or functional differences between them.  This discovery respects the fact that the distinction between virtues and vices can be grounded in three empirically validated theses, (1) that our actions are formative of the sort of person we become, (2) that practice makes perfect, and (3) that the acquisition of a virtue confers power over potentially disruptive eruptions of passion or desire.  But it forces me to question whether virtues empower individuals to live morally.

         From an empirical perspective, the critical apparatus forged by Nietzsche and Sartre generates analyses of everyday experiences which shatter the illusion that long-practiced reactions occur spontaneously.  Since we always remain conscious that different reactions were possible, it becomes obvious that acquired virtues and emotional reactions foster repeat performances.  They may confer the sort of mastery over eruptive passions and disruptive desires that transforms potential conflicts into tolerable transactions, but they do not and cannot foster the sort of vulnerable self-revelations conducive to deepening intimacy.

          From this perspective, the difference between a privileged list of virtues and the repertoire of emotional reactions transmitted by everyday English can be attributed to the fact that relationships between and among individuals today are far more complicated than relationships defined by cultures which valued conformity.  Neither are conducive to deepening person-to-person involvements.

          Summary:  Both Plato and Aristotle wrestled with the threat of endless questioning raised by the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance.  Both embraced the metaphor which depicted the city as the cradle and crucible of culture and civilization.  To enhance life in the city, both invoked four cardinal virtues, moderation, prudence, wisdom and justice.  And in both, the central moral issue was defined by a polar opposition between the dictum, "Might makes right", and a concern to empower individuals in ways that enabled them to live fully.

         In his baptism of Aristotle, Aquinas centered moral discourse in a conception which depicted God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.  By definition, this god-term enshrines a metaphor of power and judgment which implies that moral inquiries are designed to counter applications of the dictum, "Might makes right".  Since I want to center moral inquiries in a longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and for deepening person-to-person involvements, I must object to the way that Aquinas (1) supplemented this metaphor with a metaphor which depicted the universe as an autonomous Book of Nature authored by a rational and purposive God and (2) concluded that persons made in the image of this God could read a natural law off of this hierarchically and teleologically structured universe by the natural light of reason.

          On my part, I read the Scriptures through a code which shows that a moral discourse grounded in a metaphor of power and judgment is radically incompatible with the call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvements so urgently voiced by languages generated by a metaphor of intimacy.  And since a language of virtues is designed to confer mastery over passion and desire, it, too, distorts the gospel call.)

    To return to the critique of emotional reactions acquired through a pervasive process of socialization:  In the grieving process, identifying the deep feelings entangled in emotional reactions is only the first step.  To move through them in life-giving ways, we must be willing to feel the feelings and own them as our own,  The two are inseparable.  Thus, through the process of socialization, we learned to bury pain, anger, fear and shame by acting out the judgments embodied in emotional reactions.  In most instances, these reactions transform anger into smoldering resentments.  The anger is a human response to pain, and this emotional reaction is designed to dull the pain while fostering the illusion that we are living passionately.  In point of fact, it perpetuates judgments on others which allow us to silence the call for vulnerable self-revelations.  And since the judgments and the strategies it legitimates cannot change the other person, the only way to pass through this pain and anger to an ever-deepening intimacy with God and others is to feel them fully, just as they are, and to own them as our own.

        (NB:  The repertoire of emotional reactions we acquire through the process of socialization may serve us well socially.  In person-to-person interactions, however, the reaction we select from an extensive repertoire depends on an unreflective assessment of a concrete situation.  To illustrate the range of the repertoire, we need only note that reactions designed to deal with anger include eruptions of rage, hostile actions, smoldering resentment, nursing grievances, endless frustration, festering resentment and silent disapproval.  We choose the one which we assume will be somehow effective.

        On a personal note:  When I entered mid-life crisis, uncharacteristic eruptions of anger forced me to see that I was no longer able to control a virtual ocean of buried anger.  Unlike too many others, I could not trace this ocean to traumatic experiences in childhood.  I could see, however, that I had acquired a repertoire of emotional reactions which repressed the anger I experienced "drop by drop".  At the time, I regarded eruptions I could not control as failures on my part.  Over the course of several years, however, I began to understand the meaning of the assertion attributed to Jesus in John;  "Without me, you can do nothing."  And once I began to understand that my efforts to control anger had merely buried these experiences alive, I could also see that the indwelling Spirit was responsible for keeping these experiences alive until they could find new life in someone's love.

        In sum, emotional reactions embody judgments and strategies which produce repeat performances;  person-to-person involvements call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful responses.  As a result, I can give you formulae for reactions that will produce resentment, contempt, shame, guilt, or the like.  Clearly, however, there is no formula for vulnerable self-revelations.  In person-to-person interactions, therefore, recourse to judgments violates a commitment to vulnerability and respect, and the employment of the strategies they justify is clearly manipulative or capitulative. 

         In other words, anyone who judges pretends to view a tangled interaction from a god-like perspective.  The arrogance which infects such judgments is particularly obvious when we assume that we know what another person must do.  And the pernicious consequences of judgments are also there, though hidden, when individuals belittle themselves.  The judgments in question may delude them into thinking that they are being humble rather than arrogant.  But the interiorized critic who passes these condemnatory judgments derives its authority from two arrogant assumptions, (1) that one is solely responsible for the outcome of events in which one plays a role and (2) that one ought to have been able to ensure a perfect (ideal) outcome from the events.

         In this context, the suggestion that emotional reactions act out strategies of fight or flight can be used to expose self-protective features which foster a massive distrust of our longing for intimacy.  To do so, however, it must be allowed to expose the comfort zone conferred by the illusion that we are in control of both potentially disruptive feelings and the situation at hand.  Then, if we dare to put the issue of trust to a test through vulnerable self-revelations, we will soon discover that Jesus, fully human as well as fully God, loves each of us in the only way that intimacy between human beings can deepen.  By extension, we will begin to understand why Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit cannot answer anguished pleas to change us from without.

         In my mid-life crisis, the failure of the triune God to answer my pleas to change me prepared me to appreciate the intensely personal ways that Jesus comes to me through graced interactions with others.  In the beginning, I was jolted by the discovery that Jesus came to me primarily through interactions in which I found myself at cross-purposes with those I had let into my life.  Metaphorically speaking, I had to become a broken person before I was able to listen to the urgings of the Spirit in my deepest longing and my deepest feelings.  Gradually, repeated experiences of helplessness forced me to admit that I could not rescue loved ones or myself from the grieving process required to bring new life to experiences which had left us wounded and confused.  But I also saw how their willingness to remain involved with me, despite my flawed interactions with them, enabled me to understand that Jesus longed to come to us through one another, so that we might all immerse ourselves in a shared quest for an ever-more fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    Make no mistake.  Jesus, the eternal Word incarnate, is fully human as well as fully God.  If we commit ourselves to a journey to deepening intimacy with him, he will continually call us to a more fully human existence than we can imagine at the time.  As we respond, we will come to understand the purpose of the incarnation.  And, since Jesus was constantly involved in discerning the activity of the Father and the Holy Spirit in his life, we will understand that, if the involvement of Father and the Spirit in our lives is to be both respectful and faithful, they must wait for us to invite Jesus into our lives through vulnerable self-revelations.  In these self-revelations, our longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence meets Jesus' longing to share intimately in this quest.  And a growing trust in our deepest longing and in Jesus' love allows the Father's love to enter into naturally happening events with the assurance that even the most painful experiences will be fruitful (in some version or other of the cross-resurrection theme) and to allow the indwelling Spirit's love to transform long-buried feelings into cries for new life in another's love.

    When this incarnational theology is applied to the Sacramental system, the Eucharist can be seen as the renewal of the covenant embodied in the birth of the Incarnate Word as a fully human person, passionate and vulnerable.  (To be fully involved in the lives of finite human beings, even God had to enter our existence in this way.)  As a ritual re-enactment. its references to Jesus' death on the cross assure us that his passionate and vulnerable love is also ever-faithful.  In effect, it re-enacts the saving action which Francis of Assisi centered, inseparably, in the Crib, the Cross and the Eucharist.

         (NB:  Elsewhere, I argue that a form of life which calls for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions between lovers differs radically from the form of life implicit in the analysis of love set forth in Pope Benedict's Encyclical on love.  The Pope is often praised for rejecting the traditional devaluation of erotic love.  To endow such love with value, however, he invokes Plato's fusion of desire and passion in a single conception (eros) and a traditional mystical theory indebted to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.  The latter centered the process of achieving a mystical union with God in three stages.  The first, the Purgative Stage, involved detaching oneself from the seductive power of natural desires and disruptive passions.  (The suspicion of passion and desire at its core generated spiritualities which encoded a host of ascetical practices designed to discipline (and punish) fallen human nature.)  Presumably, a rigorous use of ascetical practices functioned as a rite of passage into the Illuminative Way.  At this stage of the journey, honest searchers were presumably ready to raise their minds to a higher realm through meditation on the truths of the Christian tradition.  (In effect, they were to subject desire and passion to an understanding of reason which virtually identified the use of reason with a detached contemplation in which they entered a realm akin to Plato's realm of eternal, changeless, interpenetrating ideal Forms.  After all, since Augustine had implanted these ideal forms in the mind of God, the path to a mystical union with God lay through the formative power of absolute truths, and Aquinas had referred to eternal life as a timeless enjoyment of a Beatific Vision rather a loving involvement pregnant with infinity.)

   As a philosopher of language, I am endlessly fascinated by the promises encoded in theological systems.  Consequently, I am sometimes frustrated when my critique of the literary origins of the "promise" of a Beatific Vision draw blank stares from Catholics who learned that description of our heavenly existence in childhood.  Nonetheless, when I fear that I am making mountains out of molehills, I remind myself (1) that Francis surely longed for a mystical union with Jesus and (2) that his quest was defined as much by the crib as the cross.  In this context, an incarnational theology integrates a belief that the Stigmata were a sign of Francis' union with the crucified Jesus with his imaginative recreation of Luke's story of the birth of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem (since there was no room in the inn).

    Here, I repeat an extended reading of Luke's story of the birth of Jesus in earlier reflections.  This reading is indebted to a hermeneutical approach to the four Gospels which views them as a faith-filled dialogue among early Christians, honest searchers who realized that a language capable of discerning the activity of God in contingent events in human history had to be centered in a belief in an incomprehensible God and a description of human reality capable of supporting a coherent moral discourse.  From this perspective, Luke composed his stories several decades before the author of John consigned the vision inscribed in the hymn in the Prologue of his text to writing.  But it is this vision which gives form and direction to the hermeneutical theory which offers fruitful insights into the way that the author of Luke strove to evoke a commitment to Jesus as the way, the truth and the life.

         Thus, my reading of Luke's story of the birth of Jesus takes me to the first profoundly religious experiences that I remember.  As a child, I went to my aunt and uncle's farm whenever I could.  As the middle child in my family, I often felt like the lost child.  At my aunt and uncle's, I was the only child.  And when I roamed the fields at night with old Fritz, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, my awe at the vastness of the universe was inseparable from the awe evoked by a joyful sense that the Creator of this universe was aware of me.

         As a result, I easily identify with the shepherds.  Dwelling under the endless stars as they did, they must sometimes have experienced the ecstatic awe that a transcend list theology and spirituality favors.  And I am delighted with the way that Luke heightens this awe by adding angels to the scene.  As the story develops, however, it works in a manner akin to the parables of Jesus.

         On their part, the parables are framed by a literary form whose structure can see seen in the parable of the Good Samaritan.  In response to the question, "Who is my neighbor?", Jesus personifies the definition of "neighbor" inscribed in the Mosaic Law in the priest and the Levite in order to stand the exclusivity inherent in a doctrine of divine election on its head.  These characters in his story pass by a wounded compatriot, but an outsider, a hated Samaritan, goes well beyond any obligation to care for a fellow human being in need.  And through this one telling detail, Jesus replaced the vision of a people set apart by an exclusive election with a vision of a God whose love is all-inclusive. 

        Luke's story functions as a parable.  The scene it sets is designed to evoke an awareness of the awesome power of the Creator manifest in creation and to voice a call to give glory to God.  Indeed, the reference to angels celebrating the glory of God seems to privilege the sort of ecstatic experience favored by a transcendentalist theology.  But the deepest awe is evoked by the sign given to the shepherds"  "You will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger."

        In and through this sign, an incarnational theology trumps a transcend list theology every time.

(An Apology)

    My extended critiques of a transcendentalist theology may become tiresome.  I can only plead that, to live with intellectual integrity, I must situate my convictions in a literary space populated by positions I reject.  I might blame Nietzsche and Ong for this compulsion, since they evoked my fascination with the dialogue among literature, philosophy and theology which constitutes the western literary tradition.  And this perspective compels me to expose the sterile uses of the Scriptures encoded in contemporary religious rhetorics, Catholic and Protestant.

    In this context, Calvin's doctrine of eternal pre-destination took the inner logic of any transcend list theology to an extreme which will never be surpassed.  Today, few Protestant theologians embrace this doctrine, but many echo the doctrine of exclusive election that it inscribes.  And in charismatic circles, linguistic formulations which echo the belief in the absolute dominion of a jealous God from which he derived this doctrine still abound.      Thus, in its own right, this doctrine asserted, categorically, that, from all eternity, God had decreed who would be among the elect and who would be condemned to eternal damnation.  And since human agency had nothing to do with salvation or damnation, the only response to this belief was to give glory to God.  Among Charismatics, it appears in a formulaic attribution of all honor and glory to God at the conclusion of petitionary prayers.  Presumably, the use of this formula assures God and prayer-partners that the petitioner takes no credit for the miracle which they expect to happen because they prayed in Jesus' name.

    But each time I hear this conclusion, I want to scream:  God is not a jealous God.  (I remain silent because I sense a craving for the security inscribed in a belief-system centered in a God of judgment and power, and I know that my proclamation of a God who willingly comes to us through one another would leave them shaken and disturbed.  I justify my silence by telling myself that, until they become broken people, they cannot pass through the grieving process to a trust that each of the divine Persons will be involved with them in intensely personal ways on their journey into the unknown.)

A Return to Luke's Story

    

    To return to Luke's story, Luke populated the stage for his story with shepherds.  Presumably, some among them had been awed by the vastness of creation.  But the angels' message to the shepherds is not designed to enhance the sort of ecstatic raptures which could be used to generate a transcendentalist theology.  In the most obvious way, it points instead in the direction of an incarnational theology.  "This will be a sign to you:  you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger."      To readers without pre-conceptions, this message dramatizes the willingness of the triune God (the all-powerful Creator) to enter fully (i.e., passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully) into the lives of each and every human being.  (By definition, this God is not a wrathful Judge, a jealous Lover, a God determined to establish dominion over all the earth, or a God who gives the devil his due by decreeing that his only-begotten Son must undergo a cruel and humiliating crucifixion to make fitting reparation for the momentary allegiance to rule of Satan inherent in the sin of Adam.)

    In subtle ways, the message also illuminates the different role that an incarnational and a transcend list theology assign to the indwelling Spirit in the lives of all human beings.  In this regard, the inner logic of Pope Benedict's Encyclicals (and his book on Jesus) implies that the theology he espouses contains the fullness of revelation.  I suggest, however, that this inner logic devalues the ways that the Spirit has been and continues to be active in other religions and other strands of the Christian tradition and explains why Pope Benedict seeks to confine the activity of the Spirit within the bounds of the institutional Church.  But the story of the Annunciation presents a very different vision.

    In this story, Mary's response to the message of the angel, "Be it done onto me according to your word", enabled the Spirit to call the eternal Word to enter human history as her child.  By implication, the indwelling Spirit's word of love now enables individuals to respond as Mary did, so that the Incarnate Word can dwell within them.  And as a later discussion of the Enneagram will show, the indwelling Spirit reveals to non-Christians their longing for the sort of intimate involvements with God and other human beings which for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    Christians, then, are blessed because they can cultivate intimate involvements with each of the divine Persons.  If they do so, they soon discover that the triune God is a God of surprises.  And they also discover that they cannot impose their personal beliefs on these divine Persons.

 

    In sum, since the transcendentalist and incarnational theologies are products of diverging literary traditions, they understand the saving activity of the eternal Word in very different ways.  Thus, Pope Benedict's understanding of the meaning of the Incarnation is captive to his conviction that the Word is already fully revealed in a deposit of faith entrusted to the Church.  And to see how this assumption is the offspring of Aquinas' wedding of reason and revelation, one need only see that the rationalist strand in the western philosophical tradition assumes that, if the languages in use are subjected to analyses generated and governed by reason, a language capable of presenting the whole of reality transparently will emerge.

        (Aside:  I am suggesting that Pope Benedict draws the terms that he seeks to impose on ecumenical dialogue from a conviction that the Catholic Church is already the repository of the fullness of revelation (and that, as the guardian of the fullness, he must expose the errors of others.)  But this conviction is meaningless to me, as it must be to anyone familiar with Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of language and with the theological implications of Newman's work on the development of doctrine.

        (The manuals used in my seminary courses in theology asserted that the deposit of faith was complete at the time of the death of the last apostle.  If this is true, there can be no development of doctrine.  -  In the same vein, Protestant denominations can insist that the Scriptures are a written word of God which contain the answers to any and all questions which could ever be asked.  But this insistence echoes rationalism's promise that inquiries governed by reason could ultimately yield an ideal language capable of being inscribed in an autonomous text.)

    In marked contrast, an incarnational theology implies that, to be fully human as well as fully God, the incarnate Word entered the journey into the unknown delineated by the Exodus-theme which runs through the biblical stories.  As one like us, he had to go apart often to process his intensely personal involvements with individuals he encountered.  Like us, also, he allowed his quest to be governed by narrative structure since it alone allows individuals to co-author a shared journey to deepening intimacy which respects the mysterious freedom of all concerned.  And since that journey is always a work in progress, the Word enters an open-ended story.  (Quite obviously, an open-ended story is not generated by a totality hidden in the beginning or by a teleologically structured human nature.

    This contrast offers intriguing insights into the way that different understandings of the activity of the Word and the Holy Spirit encode different understandings of the workings of divine love and of the role of Jesus as the mediator between God and humans.

    (1)  In previous entries, I advanced two theses.  One, the supposition that the eternal Word entered human history to make reparation for human sinfulness presents a tragically diminished understanding of the love of Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit for each and every human being.  And two, the classification of charity as a theological virtue objectifies love.  Here, I suggest that both the supposition and the classification introduce a curious impersonality into the language of love.

         As Francis of Assisi discovered, however, the awareness that the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit long to be intimately involved in one's life leads one to trust that each of these divine Persons is involved with one in uniquely personal ways.  Or, as I argue in all my reflections, this awareness reveals that Jesus is passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with each of us in all our experiences. 

    (2)  The second issue can be framed by a brief consideration of the difference between the formulaic insistence that Jesus is the sole mediator between God and humans, on the one hand, and my belief that Jesus' love comes to us through one another, on the other.  The formula rests on the belief that original sin introduced a chasm between God and sinful humans which only the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross could bridge.  Luther, as usual, provides the paradigm example.  Historically, his doctrine of justification by faith alone was designed to counter the belief that the institutional Church played a crucial role in salvation-history.  Tragically, it allowed Luther to set the terms for a misplaced debate in which both sides placed Jesus at the center of an hierarchically structured relationship between God and creatures.

          (Note well:  In the Catholic tradition, this hierarchical structure is encoded in the Tridentine Mass which so-called Traditionalists regard as the only authentic way to celebrate the Eucharist.  The priest who celebrates the Eucharist with his back to the congregation is a clear symbol of mediation, but the ceremony as a whole is viewed as a ritual re-enactment of Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross in reparation for human sinfulness.)

       

    In the liturgical arena, the prayer at the Offertory of the Eucharistic celebration offers a fruitful entry into the point at issue.  As a drop of water is added to the wine, we ask that we may come to share in the divinity of him who shares our humanity so fully.  As the celebration continues, the consecration of these gifts points to Jesus' longing to share fully in all we face, do, and feel, while the reception of Communion seals the commitment between us to co-author a journey to ever-deepening intimacy.  The conclusion is obvious.  Jesus is one person, fully human and fully divine.  If we are involved with him in intensely personal ways, we share in his divinity as well as his humanity.  And we do so, not because we are involved with him as a mediator or because we become in any way divine, but because we respond to him as the tremendous Lover and wounded Healer.

    Here, then, I cannot help but apply this understanding of the workings of the incarnate Word to my disagreement with Benedict XVI on the issue of ecumenical dialogue (and, implicitly, on the operation of the Spirit).  For a concrete application, I gladly acknowledge the many ways that the Enneagram has deepened my understanding of the incarnational theology inscribed in the hymn in the Prologue of John.  The Enneagram is a product of the Sufi strand in the Moslem tradition.  Historically, this strand integrates a call to mysticism with a spirituality which witnesses to God's longing to be involved with individuals in ways that free them to live more fully human and uniquely personal lives.  To that end, it identifies nine root fears which stifle, distort or cripple our responses to God and to other human beings.  In so doing, it enriches a language of quest with a language capable of guiding individuals on an inner journey.  In that vein, it is far more in tune with the biblical tradition which endows human existence with a narrative structure than Pope Benedict's spirituality.

    On my journey, my introduction to the Enneagram helped me understand the insidious ways that I had been ruled by a fear of being ordinary.  And on a positive note, this instrument provided me with a language which enabled me to process past and present experiences in far more fruitful ways than the language generated by the dualism at the core of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin.  So I must conclude that the Holy Spirit was involved in the Sufi quest for a mystical union with God and a fully human existence, though that quest was not framed by the meta-narrative implicit in the Prologue of John.

    Given the popularity of the Enneagram in Catholic circles, I am confident that it will continue to enrich the language of an incarnational theology, but I can only wonder how Benedict XVI would integrate it in the belief-system he seeks to impose on the Catholic tradition.  In the same vein, I cannot imagine an analysis of the human condition generated by a transcendentalist theology which would persuade me to suspect insights formulated by honest searchers outside the Christian tradition.  To this day, the language of the Enneagram invites me to extricate myself from judgments implicit in the Purgative Way's call to overcome passions and desires (which inscribes Augustine's dualistic doctrine of original sin).  By extension, the way that its metaphorical distinction among gut, head and heart gives passion, desire and reason equal respect has richer implications than Benedict XVI's call to subject the gut and the heart to the head.  And as a call for integration rather than transcendence, it replaces the promise of a spiritualized existence in some supernatural realm with a promise of a more fully human existence.  In so doing, it counters the supposition that a stance of detached contemplation is more fully human than the embrace of the passions and desires tapped by person-to-person interactions.

        (Aside:  The contrasts noted above offer insights into crucial differences between the language of the Enneagram and the language accredited by Aquinas' description of eternal life as an endless contemplation of a Beatific Vision.  In mystical theories which use "vision" as the god-term, if we reached a mystical union with God by passing through an illuminative (contemplative) stage, we would acquire on earth a passive stance which would find its fulfillment in heaven.  But the weakness of a spirituality which prizes a contemplative stance is evident in the way that a hierarchically structured belief-system encoded a spatial model.

       (This spatial model generated references to heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo as places where we might dwell temporarily or for all eternity.  I am grateful that Benedict has erased Limbo from Catholic theological discourse, but his penchant for granting indulgences indicates his determination to retain Aquinas' spatial framework.

       (In marked contrast, a theology framed by a metaphor of intimacy depicts a dynamic state in which we will spend an eternity interacting in intensely personal ways with each of the three divine Persons, yet never exhaust an infinity.

       (Here, as elsewhere, Pope Benedict's debt to Augustine's doctrine of original sin is apparent in his desire to restore the Tridentine Mass.  I.e., the formulaic references to a beatific vision in a theology of transcendence imply that, in heaven, a passive stance whose hollow center is filled with awe and reverence will replace a life filled with the internal turmoil dramatized by Augustine's Confessions.  In rather obvious ways, it is this passive sense of awe that advocates of the Tridentine Mass seek to recover.

       (On my part, I am continually awed by the willingness of Jesus, the Word incarnate, to entrust both himself and those he loves to me, with all my flaws.  As I explore this difference, I also grieve over Pope Benedict's invocation of the amorphous doctrine of exclusive election implicit in Augustine's doctrine of original sin.  My experience over the course of my fifty years as a priest is so different from his.  Meeting as I did with wounded individuals, I learned through sad experience that I must respond to vulnerable self-revelations without judgments or agendas if I hope to allow Jesus' love to touch those whom the Father's providence sends into my life.  I do not know what it is to be fully human or uniquely myself, and neither do they.  How can I pretend to sit in judgment?  I do not love them as Jesus loves them.  How can I determine how his love is at work in them?  But if I am honest with them about what I feel and think, vulnerably and respectfully, they do encounter Jesus, the wounded Healer and the tremendous Lover.

    To belabor the obvious, I have been a spiritual director to many who longed for an intensely personal involvement with Jesus.  Again and again, I listened to the urging of the Spirit before I responded to their vulnerable self-revelations.  Not once did I sense a call to invite them to accept Jesus as their personal Savior or to suggest that anyone who wants to experience God's immediate presence in their lives must pass through the purgative and illuminative ways.  And as I processed these experiences from a theological perspective, I became more and more convinced that a transcendentalist theology implies a doctrine of exclusive election which cannot be reconciled with my trust in God's all-inclusive, ever-faithful love.

        (Aside:  Pope Benedict frames the analysis of love in his Encyclical on love with a transcendentalist theology.  On one level, this analysis is a seductive attempt to escape from the dualism at the core of Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Augustine's doctrine of original sin.  In Plato, the dualism is inherent in the distinction between a flawed existence in a realm of flux and a longing to return to a realm of Ideal Forms from which one had somehow fallen.  To obscure this dualism, Plato fused passion and desire in an abstract conception of erotic love.  To close the hermeneutical circle in a way that erased the dualism entirely, he promised that the final state of existence delineated in the Allegory of the Cave would be devoid of both passion and desire.

        (In the Pope's Encyclical, passion and desire appear as God-given urges to escape from the turmoil they trigger by spiritualizing intensely human interactions between lovers.  Quite obviously, this definition of erotic love supports the emphasis on transcendence which is so evident in his willingness to restore the Tridentine Mass and his insistence that Vatican II was merely a development of the ecclesiology and moral discourse canonized by the Council of Trent.

         (In marked contrast, an incarnational theology promises that desire and passion will subvert efforts to spiritualize them since such efforts abort or distort the longing for or distorts the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  On a positive note, it generates an ethics of intimacy which promises more fully human involvements, not to a spiritualization of the love.  To enable lovers to realize this promise, this ethics transmits a language capable of evoking passionate, vulnerable and respectful responses in situations in which they find themselves at cross-purposes with one another.  And it does so by enabling struggling individuals (1) to identify, embrace and own their tangled passions and most urgent desires and (2) to see that, since they cannot change anyone else, owning their feelings means taking full responsibility for whatever response they make to any encounter.

         (Experientially, though the process may be painful, the resulting awareness is liberating rather than burdensome.  But that is hardly surprising, since the process frees them from the false belief that, to love and be loved, they have to become something they are not. 

         (In my own life, identifying and owning buried anger at a time when I was going through a prolonged depression enabled me to trust the movement of the indwelling Spirit in my tangled depths.  Providentially, I had friends who challenged my propensity for flight in events or situations which tapped deeply buried feelings or unacknowledged desires.  Grudgingly, I was forced to identify the emotional reactions which placed me at cross-purposes with others and to recognize that these reactions were not conducive to deepening person-to-person involvements.  Gradually (and painfully), I discovered that I could be a man of longing and that passion and desire play an indispensable role in any journey to deepening intimacy.  And through this discovery, I began to understand that it was the indwelling Spirit's love for me which kept alive the anger I sought to bury so that new life might come to me once I was ready to bring it to the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit through vulnerable self-revelations.

        (I cannot reconcile this passage through a prolonged depression to a willingness to trust in the love of each of the three divine Person's for me with the Pope's espousal of judgments and strategies designed to bury potentially disruptive passions and master natural desires.  On a more positive note, I credit this passage with enabling me to be deeply involved with wounded individuals who do not understand that their cries from the depths voice calls to bring the wounds which distort their tangled and tortured reactions to one another and to Jesus, the Wounded Healer.

         (In this context, I envision the anonymous inquisitors entrenched in the Roman Curia as an imaginary audience who would react aggressively to an incarnational theology.  In the imaginary conversations which their pronouncements trigger in me, they accuse me of being a false prophet who promises that God loves everyone, no matter what.  In my response, I suggest that such an accusation could only be voiced by career clergymen who have never let profoundly wounded individuals into their lives.  In my experience, the willingness to be passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with individuals has demanded more of me than any moral principle or law ever could.  And I now celebrate the many ways these demands have called me to an intimate involvement with the Holy Spirit who dwells lovingly in my tangled depths.  In the same vein, I celebrate the ways that listening to the cries of longing voiced by others evoked in me a longing for the fullness of life in another's love which plunged me, willynilly, into an inner journey.  At times, embracing the longing for intimacy evoked an aching loneliness and an overwhelming sense of futility.  But looking back, I can see how the surrender of socially acceptable judgments and strategies left me in a void at a time when I did not yet know how to let the triune God heal me and love me into wholeness.)

    As I try to wrap up this entry, I find myself comparing my experience of being utterly alone with Luther's conviction that a confession of utter and inescapable sinfulness would enable individuals to "stand naked before God", prepared to receive justification by faith alone.  The metaphor, "to stand naked before God", is clearly a metaphor of intimacy.  Just as clearly, the doctrine of justification by faith alone promises instant intimacy.  Again and again, I longed for instant intimacy, but I became aware that I could not respond from my hidden depths until my illusions of instant intimacy were shattered by missed communications which exposed my inability to be honest about what I thought and felt with myself, God or anyone else.  And I also became aware that this inability to be honest revealed (1) that deepening involvements brought every trust-issue I had ever experienced to the fore and (2) that my profound sorrow over breaks with intimacy in the past did not silence the call to revisit those events in ways that allowed the Father's providence and the indwelling Spirit's love to bring new life out of them for me and others.

        (Aside:  To supplement my suggestion that Luther's doctrine promises instant intimacy, I note my agreement with Bonhoeffer's suggestion that it offers "cheap grace."  On a more foundational level, however, an experience evoked by a confession of utter and inescapable sinfulness dictated by a doctrine of original sin differs radically from the experience of loneliness evoked by a deepening involvement which exposes the illusions inherent in any promise of instant intimacy.)

    As I passed through mid-life crisis, I was intrigued by echoes of John of the Cross' metaphorical reference to "the dark night of the soul" that I heard in the analysis of human experience inscribed in Sartre's Being and Nothingness.  Regarding John of the Cross, I suggest that he was unable to escape entirely from the traditional theory which assumed that purging oneself of passion and desire was essential to the quest for a mystical union with God.  Presumably, once one mastered these unruly urges, one entered a half-way house between enslavement to unruly urges and an immediate (mystical) union with the triune God.  But other passages suggest that his reference to a dark night of the soul is a metaphorical reference to an experience of being utterly alone which may exceed its grasp, but the grasp encodes an experience of total vulnerability, not a promise of transcendence.  As such, the metaphor interprets the experience as a step in a process which enables us to open vulnerably to God's passionate love for us.  And that experience evokes an ecstatic awareness of being the unique individual we are, not a revelation of our nothingness before the infinite.

    In this vein, though Sartre insists that intensely personal involvements degenerate into sado-masochistic interaction, his Being and Nothingness supplements his embrace of the timeless myth of pure beginnings generated by Descartes' methodical doubt with a metaphor of intimacy.  To articulate his understanding of the experience of loneliness, Sartre embraced the purportedly timeless myth of pure beginnings first generated by Descartes's methodical doubt and, like Descartes, populated the myth with solipsistic individuals suspended over an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivity and objectivity.  To supplement this myth of origin, he used Husserl's phenomenological method to replace the traditional categorization of human beings as rational animals with the biblical analysis which attributed the origin of each unique individual to an eruption of an intentionally structured consciousness.  In this context, he sought to establish his authority over both Augustine and Hegel (1) by wedding Hegel's insistence on the boundlessness of consciousness with Augustine's famous dictum, "Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they will not rest until they rest in you" and (2) by using Hegel to justify the replacement of God in Augustine's dictum with solipsistic individual separated by an unbridgeable chasm.  From all these literary sources, he generated his own depiction of solipsistic individuals as "passions for the infinite" and "futile projects to be God" who were condemned to a terrifying loneliness.

    Consequently, though Being and Nothingness derived its structure from a metaphor of intimacy, Sartre's rationalism consigned his analysis of experience to the rule of the One.  That rule is obvious in the phenomenological analysis of passionate involvements designed to reveal the unfathomable depths and mysterious freedom of unique individuals who cannot cross an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivities.  To realize a tragic sort of unity, they must seek to obliterate their own individuality or that of the Other.  And in the final analysis, hell is other people, and there is no exit from this human condition.

    If we are indeed futile projects to be God mired in sado-masochist interactions with others, we are condemned to an excruciating loneliness in an absurd state of existence.  But the argument depends entirely on Sartre's suggestion that the intentional structure of consciousness is centered in the workings of a double nihilation.  Presumably, his phenomenological analysis of a consciousness reveals that we are not the object of the conscious experience in question, nor are we merely our immediate response to that object, since we were capable of responding in countless other ways.  Each act of consciousness, therefore, is a pure beginning which plunges us into nothingness.

    Lest the discussion of Sartre seem hopelessly abstract, I merely note that his metaphorical reference to an eruptive consciousness which plunges us into nothingness echoes the biblical narratives which depict human existence as a perpetual journey into the unknown.  As a result, passages in Being and Nothingness offer a secularized version of John of the Cross' "dark night of the soul."  But John's metaphor identifies this experience as a passage on the journey to deepening intimacy, while Sartre's analysis situates it in a purportedly timeless myth of pure beginnings.

    Here, I again invoke Nietzsche's thesis that the rationalist tradition was propelled by a hidden will to power.  From this perspective, though Sartre was primarily concerned with passionate engagements, his supposition that intimacy required identification exposes his commitment to the rule of the One.  And that rule would indeed reduce passionate involvements between individuals to interactions governed by a hidden will to power.

    In everyday life, however, Sartre's insistence that passionate involvements inexorably degenerate into sado-masochistic violence is falsified by the experience of individuals who have committed themselves to vulnerable and respectful self-revelations.  And so is Descartes' myth of pure beginnings, Kant's abstract conception of the autonomous individual, and the role played by both in the myth of Modernity.  On the inner journey evoked by events which tap deeply buried feelings, these individuals discover how difficult it is to free themselves from the hold of formative events in their personal histories.  But they also discover that such interactions transform their longing for an ever-deepening person-to-person involvement into a realizable quest.  Moreover, as they interact passionately, respectfully and faithfully, they discover that their attempts to speak in their own voices plunge them into a process which is individuating in a way that no other process can match. 

    Consequently, I wish that all theologians would face the challenge inherent in the Sartrean analysis of an ethical theory designed to legitimate the rule of the One.  If they did, they would have to recognize the impossibility of reconciling a meta-narrative governed by the dictates of reason with a meta-narrative whose narrative structure is indebted to the biblical tradition.  (And they would have to recognize the absurdity of the project which Pope Benedict sought to impose on theologians in his Regensburg Address.)

        (Regarding the comments above:  I have not undertaken a scholarly study of John of the Cross' text, and I cannot entirely trust my memories of engagement with this text in a distant past.  But these memories remind me that I was struck by John's apparent lack of concern with the illuminative way as a factor in a process leading to an immediate experience of God's loving presence.  And they lead me to believe that his metaphorical reference to a dark night of the soul can easily be reconciled with the loneliness I experienced which I recognized the futility of judgments and strategies motivated by my desire to be a savior of others.  Initially, this recognition left me with no points of contact with others, including those I loved so passionately.  And since it occurred when I was becoming more deeply involved with others than I had ever been, it led me to believe that John of the Cross' chaste involvement with Theresa of Avila contributed to the metaphors he projected in a literary composition intended to delineate the path to a mystical union with God.)

Theology as a Literary Tradition

    A postmodernist reading of three strands in the western literary tradition  -  literature, philosophy and theology  -  reveals that a theology of transcendence and an incarnational theology are both indebted to the literary form inscribed in Babylonian epics consigned to writing in the second millennium, BCE, but are products of divergent literary traditions.

    1.  The Theology of Transcendence:  Pope Benedict XVI's theological vision is profoundly influenced by the synthesis of faith and reason inscribed in Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  In this text, a conception of reason forged by a philosophical tradition which originated in ancient Greece dictates a peculiar understanding of faith.  As a literary construction, reason was designed to subject the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance to the totalizing thrust of language.  Functionally, it inscribed the totalizing thrust in the notion of an all-encompassing Being in which everything participated.  To resolve issues raised by emerging distinctions among language, experience and reality, it filled the hollow center of this notion of Being with a conception of reason which transformed the interiorized interrogatory stance into a detached, disinterested, dispassionate, god-like perspective which rational beings could occupy interchangeably.  Then, as theologians embraced the philosophical tradition's promise that inquiries governed by reason would yield a comprehensive and coherent description of Being, they generated an understanding of faith which privileged belief over trust.  Thereafter, theology emerged as a polemically structured discipline in which authors sought to validate the truth of their convictions by exposing the weakness of competing belief-systems. 

    For true believers, theological inquiries centered in a synthesis of faith and reason seemed to escape from the dualism which plagued mid-east cultures at the time.  In point of fact, the rule of reason re-inscribed dualism in the distinctions it generated.  On the one hand, it burdened a fascination with form with a suspicion of passion and desire.  And on the other, it subjected inquiries to the rule of a metaphor of power and judgment.  And syntheses of the two privileged a meta-narrative which described God's saving activity in and through the Word as a response to sin, not a gift of over-flowing love.  And since theologians had to offer biblical warrant for their sin-centered meta-narratives, they could not escape the dualism inscribed the doctrine of original sin which Augustine abstracted from the story of Adam and Eve.

        (When Protestant theologians applied their meta-narrative to the traditional distinction between the sacred and the secular, the dualism re-appeared in the polar opposition between the totalitarian theocracy advocated by Calvin and the autonomy of the secular advanced by Luther.  I.e., though both Calvin and Luther sought to erase the dualism inherent in the traditional distinction, the dualism inscribed in the meta-narrative they shared accommodated these polar opposites.)

    In ways they seldom acknowledge, philosophers in the Modern Era secularized the theological discourse forged by medieval theologians.  Consequently, they, too, were plagued by the issue of dualism.  On the one hand, the rationalism indebted to Descartes fostered a search for an ideal language consisting of clear and distinct conceptions in a coherent, consistent, comprehensive and closed system which would present the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail.  And since rationalism signaled an irreversible triumph of literacy over orality, such a language could presumably be consigned to an autonomous text, i.e., a bounded text which, because it was written in continuous prose, was self-interpreting and which, because it presented reality immediately, was self-referential.  Presumably, the successful fulfillment of such a search would erase dualism entirely from the language.  But dualism re-entered as an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivity and objectivity.   

    Though efforts to erase all traces of dualism received a definitive form in the Age of the Enlightenment, it appeared in rudimentary form in Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  This text was framed (1) by the metaphor of the Two Books, an autonomous Book of Nature which inscribed God's moral will and the Book of the Scriptures which revealed God's saving will and (2) by the traditional dictum, "Grace builds on nature".  Since the latter suggested that God's creative and saving wills were somehow integrated, the Scriptures could be used to guide inquiries into the workings of nature, while readings of the Book of Nature by a natural light of reason could aid in the interpretation of the Scriptures. (Centuries later, Luther's slogan, "sola Scriptura", voiced his rejection of the supposition that grace builds on nature, but this rejection would have been literally inconceivable without the understanding of the metaphor of the Two Books developed by a dialogue set in motion by Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  In its own right, this Summa promised an autonomous text which wove precisely formulated doctrines into a coherent, comprehensive and closed theological system.)

    In the same vein, the rule of the One over theological inquiries yielded a formula which depicted the rational and purposive God of the philosophers as the creator of each unique individual, the author of society, the master of the universe, the lord of history and the arbiter of human destiny.  Centuries later, rationalists bewitched by the ideals of the Enlightenment fashioned the myth of Modernity in a way designed to assert their authority over the Christian tradition.  To that end, they simply replaced the God of the Philosophers in the traditional formula with the conception of the autonomous individual.  As the ruling One, autonomous individuals could presumably create their own identities, co-author a social contract constituting an ideal society, use knowledge conferred by advances in science to harness nature to their purposes, and thereby become lords of history and arbiters of their own destinies.

    Today, postmodernist readings of the Christian tradition and the myth of Modernity expose the totalizing thrust inherent in both versions of the formula.  And to expose the insidious ways that a will to power is inscribed in this totalizing thrust, postmodernist critics use the interrogatory stance at the core of reason to force reason to recoil upon itself.  (That recoil appears in a less obvious way in Locke's revision of the Hobbesian social contract.  Hobbes had argued that reason compelled individuals to confer absolute authority on a dictator as the only way to escape from a perpetual war of all against all.  Locke replaced this totalitarian contract with a social contract in which an alienable right to freedom functioned as the rule of the One.  To do so, however, he had to present reason as a tool, not a master.  And he accomplished this by reducing the workings of the interrogatory stance to the workings of enlightened self-interest.  -   In the same vein, the rule of the One is apparent in revolutionary movements spawned by the ideals of the Enlightenment.  The rhetoric designed to enlist true believers who are willing to do anything needed to hasten the coming of the promised Kingdom on Earth replaced metaphysical and methodological inquiries with ideological visions of an inexorably unfolding march of history toward a final realization of an ideal society.  These visions adopted the narrative structure of the biblical tradition (as well as its eschatological themes), but filled its hollow center with a conception which presented reason as both master and tool.  In every instance, they assumed that an ideal state of existence enshrined in Being propelled a process that would soon replace a history of conflict with the timeless existence promised by Plato's Allegory of the Cave.  And since they convinced that the arrival of this state of existence was imminent, they legitimated the use of violence to promote its triumph.

    2.  An incarnational theology:  The language needed to process experience in a way that promotes intimacy with the triune God and loved ones is the product of a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative.  This literary form was forged by storytellers in ancient Israel because it, and only it, formulated inquiries capable of probing passionate interactions between and among unique individuals.  The early storytellers who laid the literary foundations for the Hebrew narrative tradition are referred to as the Yahwist and the Elohist after the name they used to refer to God in their stories.  If these stories are read as literature, they bear witness to a passionate desire to understand how an incomprehensible God was involved with human beings endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom in the everyday events in their personal histories.

        (In Alter's reading, the Yahwist is more interested in exploring the mysterious freedom of human beings than in understanding the activity of Yahweh in human history.  From this perspective, the Yahweh who reserves total authority over moral discourse to himself is merely a literary foil for the seminal glimpses of human interiority inscribed in the story of Adam and Eve.  As Paul notes in Romans, 7, a prohibition evokes inner turmoil, since it offers no intimations of creative outlets for our deepest feelings.)

    As the strong authors in the Hebrew narrative tradition, these two literary geniuses wove literary conventions into a literary form which gave form and direction to a contentious dialogue among later storytellers who sought to advance an authoritative definition of Israel's positive and distinctive identity as God's Chosen People.  As the utterances of the prophets show, however, the authoritative thrust of the dialogue was always held in check by the focus of the early stories on God's intensely personal involvement with unique individuals which provided them with a linguistic medium capable of supporting metaphors designed to enable true Israelites to discern how this God was involved with them in intensely personal ways.

    The point at issue can be seen through a comparison of analyses of language, experience and reality generated by a narrative structure with analyses governed by a logical principle of identity or the conception of an all-encompassing Being.  The interplay between a notion of Being and a principle of logical identity was used by authors in the Hellenic tradition to locate the detachment fostered by the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance in a participative existence.  The closure encoded in the comprehensive reach of Being enabled them to transform a detachment which generated endless questioning into a detached, god-like perspective.  In this vein, analyses of experience dictated by the prose narrative also focus on a participatory existence, but the participation in question depends on a commitment made by detached individuals to co-author a constantly transforming journey into the unknown.

    This comparison helps explain why the moral import of the language of intimacy is so often unintelligible to those who pretend to abstract an objective morality from the traditional metaphysical depiction of nature as a bounded system.  An objective morality grounds moral discourse outside of human reality.  The language of intimacy centers moral discourse in the inner depths of unique individuals committed to intensely personal involvements.  Sadly, any ethical theory which grounds moral discourse outside of human reality allows the rule of the One inherent in the totalizing thrust of language to blind its adherents to the hidden exercises of a will to power inscribed in the moral judgments they seek to impose on all and sundry.  Even worse, its promise of a dispassionate perspective does violence to the feelings which person-to-person involvements evoke.

Summary

    Storytellers in the Hebrew narrative tradition forged the literary framework for inquiries designed to evoke the longing for intimacy and to transform that longing into a realizable quest.  Without it, a theology which proclaims that each of the three divine Persons seeks to be intimately involved with each and every human being would be literally inconceivable, as would the metaphor of intimacy which locates God's moral will in the cries of the dispossessed, oppressed, marginalized and silenced in any culture rather than in an objective moral order inscribed in nature by a rational and purposive Creator.

    In this regard, the critique of rationalism in Heidegger's Being and Time exposes the difficulty involved in escaping from the rule of the literary form whose hollow center is filled by a principle of logical identity.  In this text, Heidegger forged a hermeneutical theory designed to counter rationalism's promise of timeless truths and definitive moral judgments.  As the title of the text indicates, this theory introduced an analysis of time which exposed the inescapable historicity of human experience.  In so doing, it generated readings of the western philosophical tradition which recovered the insight inscribed in Scotus' succinct dictum:  "In processu generationis humanae semper crevit notitia veritatis."  ("In the course of human generations, knowledge of truth constantly increases.")  But both Scotus and Heidegger used a critical apparatus indebted to the rationalist tradition to subvert from within the pretense that reasonable beings could occupy a god-like perspective which promised comprehensive knowledge of the whole of reality.  Neither considered the way that a narrative structure guarantees that any story can be retold in ways that interpret an event in radically different ways.

       (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  In and through his dialogue with rationalism and with Nietzsche, Heidegger centered a hermeneutical theory designed to expose the will to power inherent in rationalism's promise of a language capable of presenting the whole of reality transparently in a god-term.  To avoid traditional depictions of reality as a bounded system, he selected the notion of Being forged by the pre-Socratics as his god-term.  And since this notion was forged prior to the emergence of significant distinctions among language, experience and reality, it provided a literary framework for readings designed to show how a creative and gracious Being (rather than a will to power) was at work in revelatory texts.  In its own right, therefore, this literary framework replaced the traditional search defined by Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth with a hermeneutical code designed to generate readings which reveal the meaning of Being.

         (This use of the pre-Socratic notion of Being enabled Heidegger to integrate the thesis that truth lies in origins with the insistence that authors in the western literary tradition invested texts written in the past with wildly different meanings.  But from Ong's perspective, it fosters a misplaced debate.  I.e., Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth was a response to the way that literary traditions generated languages which took on lives of their own.  In this context, honest searchers in ancient Greece had to address the relationship between a language which functioned as a virtual thing-in-itself and a domain of impersonally operating forces.  But Heidegger merely postponed the need to address intensely personal involvements by advancing a hermeneutical theory framed by a notion of Being forged prior to the distinction which propelled the rationalist tradition.  And this notion failed to generate a language capable of probing the role of the prose narrative in the dialogue among literature, theology and philosophy which constitutes the western literary tradition.)

    In the Hebrew narrative tradition, the workings of the literary form of the prose narrative enabled later storytellers to locate the origin of the event in question in a more distant past, add significant details to the setting of the scene, take notice of individuals ignored in the original account, assign different motivations or intentions to all concerned, and suggest long-term consequences that the original storyteller had not anticipated.  And since these re-tellings were concerned with a description of how Israel's God was active in her history, they can be profoundly revelatory. 

    In the western literary tradition, however, rationalists who suppose that the scientific method is the only path to knowledge dismiss stories as anecdotal accounts which are far inferior to the "objective evidence" produced by controlled experiences which yield repeatable results.  But the stories which record the conditions for controlled experiments do not probe the sort of events encountered by individuals who long for deepening person-to-person involvements on a shared journey into the unknown.  To realize the purpose of the form of life which transforms that longing into a realizable quest, those involved must acknowledge that there is no authorized version of the story.  In so doing, they learn a language capable of (1) evoking the anxiety triggered by the awareness that human existence is a perpetual journey into the unknown, (2) exposing the will to power inherent in efforts to impose closure on questioning, (3) fostering a healthy suspicion of anyone who claims to be "objective" (4) generating analyses of language, experience and reality which offer fertile glimpses into the unfathomable depths of unique individuals, (5) enabling those who learn how to speak in a narrative voice to communicate in and through vulnerable self-revelations, (6) deepening one's understanding of the dynamics of interactions which promote intimacy, and (7) investing events in the past with new meanings.

    Concretely:  When our exit from the womb plunged us into a journey into the unknown, we were already unique individuals, but we had no understanding of our depths or of the mysterious depths of others.  Through a pervasive process of socialization, we acquired a language designed to help us process everyday experiences.  On my journey, however, events have taught me that judgments and strategies transmitted by everyday English which have served me well socially are counterproductive in my quest for intimacy with others, and this awareness is enhanced by that fact everyday English also transmits a language of intimacy which ensures that the longing cannot be silenced.

    To appreciate the point at issue, recall earlier references to Wittgenstein's insistence that everyday languages incorporate many distinctive forms of life, each designed to realize a specific purpose.  From this perspective, everyday English transmits many forms of life designed to facilitate interactions between and among detached individuals in distinguishable dimensions of human existence.  Those concerned with relationships between and among individuals who are not personally involved with one another (1) center these relationships in a power-structure, (2) privilege a repertoire of emotional reactions which inscribe distinctive judgments and strategies, and (3) thereby insulate social, economic, aesthetic and even moral exchanges from potentially disruptive passions and unrestrained desires.  But any form of life which generates judgments and strategies condemns those whose reactions become predictable to superficial involvements with other detached individuals.  And there is only one exit from the indifference they foster:  Sharing life-stories informed by a narrative structure which calls for vulnerable and respectful self-revelations.

    In this context, I am often asked why I am so fascinated with Sartre's analysis of human existence since I disagree so strongly with his conclusions.  To me, the answer is simple.  More than any other author, Sartre exposes the tragic consequences of a journey into the unknown on which unique individuals allow their quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence to be framed by a metaphor of power and judgment and governed by the rule of reason.  With rare honesty, he confesses that his understanding of the longing for intimacy as a longing for identity condemned him to passionate involvements governed by judgments and strategies and that such involvements inexorably generate sado-masochistic interactions.

    During my mid-life crisis, Sartre's revelatory analysis of his own passionate involvements enabled me to see that a quest framed by the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel's prophets generated a distinctive form of life whose language described love as a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement and, from this perspective, I was able to see how any recourse to judgments or strategies aborted or distorted the quest inspired by the elusive longing for intimacy.

    Here, then, I can only hope that my analysis of the dynamics of the quest for intimacy is as honest as Sartre's revelatory account of his journey into the unknown.  At any rate, it voices my conviction that unique individuals who understand the workings of the language of intimacy are able to process passionate interactions in ways that transform the longing for intimacy into a realizable quest and (2) that the passage from an intellectual insight to an existential experience can occur because the language of intimacy has been subjected to the test of experience in different ages and cultures.

        (Supplementary aside:  To support the analyses of passionate involvements which inexorably degenerate into sado-masochistic interactions, Sartre invokes a phenomenological analysis which purportedly reveals the operation of a double nihilation at the center of an intentionally structured consciousness.  However, though Sartre's proclamation that human existence is absurd and even obscene seems to separate him from his rationalist forbears, the persuasive power of his analysis depends on his hidden inscription of a logical principle of identity in the hollow center of the intentional structure of consciousness.  And it is the operation of this principle which dictates an analysis designed to show that passionate involvements trigger strategies intended to make two into one.

        (In marked contrast, the language of intimacy centers passionate involvements in the involvements themselves.  To belabor the difference:  Sartre sought to endow his analysis with authority by grounding it in a phenomenological analysis of consciousness.  The metaphor of intimacy centered in a narrative structure rather than a principle of identity generates implications designed to show whether the purpose it inscribed can transform an elusive longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  This formulation of the question ensured that such tests are revelatory if, and only if, they satisfy stringent empirical criteria.

        (In my worst moments, I am tempted to suggest that the criteria in question are needed to maintain the Cartesian chasm between subjectivity and objectivity.  At any rate, I dare rationalists to tell the story of their acquisition of the fictive voice of reason, with its inability to respect a significant distinction between the personal and the impersonal dimensions of experience.  And if they respond to this challenge with vulnerable self-revelations, I suggest that they will find that such communications plunge them into a process which (1) calls for a commitment to co-author a shared journey into the unknown, (2) invites vulnerable self-revelations capable of endowing wounding events in the past with new life with new life in each other's care, and (3), by teaching individuals how to co-author a story in which each learns how to speak in their own voices, enables them to respect and foster each other's existence as a unique individual.

        (On my inner journey, I discovered that feelings I had buried in order to control them now controlled me.  Today, this awareness textures my admittedly polemical confession that, as a philosopher of language in a tradition indebted to Scotus and Ockham, I am outraged by the reductive reading of Scotus which Pope Benedict used to disguise the commitment to Thomism inscribed in his Regensburg Address.  To justify my outrage, I appeal to Ockham's reformulation of the question at the center of Scotus's efforts to forge a philosophical framework to replace the Aristotelian metaphysics inscribed in Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  And I suggest that the way that Scotus and Ockham re-formulated traditional philosophical issues were inspired by accounts of Francis of Assisi's personal interactions with the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and his profound respect for individuals.

        (As Scotus wrestled with the assumption that the use of reason reveals a timelessly and universally valid description of human nature, he could not escape entirely from its hold on his thought and inquiry,  He did, however, project a philosophical framework which replaced Aquinas' grounding of moral discourse in a conception which depicted God as a rational and purposive author of moral discourse with a conception which depicted God as an infinite Being whose intensely personal involvements with unique individuals could not be subject to an objective moral order, even if this God has inscribed that moral order in the structure of a natural order which he had created.

        (This recovery of the vision projected by the early stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition enabled Scotus to center moral issues in intensely personal interactions between an infinite Being and flawed human beings.  But it was Ockham who carried the implicit critique of Aquinas' constrictive belief-system to its logical extreme.  On his part, Ockham targeted the formulation of issues inherent in Aquinas' baptism of Aristotle at its most vulnerable point. 

        (That point was enshrined in the priority accorded universals over individuals by Aristotle's classificatory system.  As a result, every medieval theologian was forced to address the question:  "How are universals individuated?"  To carry Scotus' suggestion that individuals were the product of a principle of haecceitas to its logical extreme, Ockham insisted that critical analyses of language and experience force honest searchers to begin with the assumption that there are individuals, not individuated universals.  As such, he formulated the question that will forever plague epistemologists:  "How do we formulate conceptions with a valid universal reach?"

        (To dismiss Ockham's question, Thomists accused him of being a Nominalist who reduced the meaning of words to a flatus voci.  That accusation trivializes Ockham's position.  He took the question as seriously as any philosopher of language today.)

3.  The Literary Origins of Both Theologies

    The detachment inherent in writing and reading ruptured the illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality.  On its part, the rupture forced authors of original texts to create literary conventions capable of supplying for the absence of the tacit clues which supplement oral-aural communications.  Somehow, in the second millennium, BCE, unknown authors in Babylon wove now familiar conventions into a literary form which projected an empty literary space between a realm of capricious deities and a realm of impersonally operating forces of nature as a place where human agents might invent creative responses to changing conditions of life.  And in the next millennium, authors in ancient Greece and ancient Israel used this form to generate diverging visions of the past, present and future.

         (COMMENTARY:  The Babylonian Epics marked a dramatic departure from timeless myths designed to ensure that practices conducive to survival were not forgotten at a time when memory was the only repository of the past.  Myths traced traditional practices to acts of deities, located those acts in a timeless past, and implied that, if the acts were not re-iterated ritually and in practice, everything would revert to a primordial chaos.  Epics traced practices designed to foster the prevailing culture to archetypal acts performed by heroes and heroines in an equally timeless past.  By implication, these practices had to be re-iterated to prevent a lapse into chaos.)

    With a certain justice, scholars refer to the thrust of the Hellenic literary tradition as the disenchantment of nature, the desacralization of society and the twilight of the gods.  In this vein, the Babylonian epic easily accommodated the role Plato assigned to reasonable beings in an empty literary space between a realm of Ideal Forms and a domain governed by forces which operated with a necessity of nature.  In this context, later authors somehow discovered that an understanding of the workings of literary languages which operated as virtual things-in-themselves could be used to penetrate the flux of experience in ways that revealed the impersonal operation of natural forces.  And once this insight generated fruitful inquiries, references to natural necessity replaced a traditional reference to an unchangeable fate.

    In this context, Plato abstracted a conception of a realm of eternal, ideal and interpenetrating Forms from a largely inarticulate insight into the workings of an enduring text written in continuous prose.  Centuries later, Plato's distinction between the existence in such an ideal realm and existence in a "fallen" state provided the literary source for the medieval distinction between a supernatural and a natural realm of existence.  As a result, the distinction between a natural and a supernatural realm of existence is as questionable as the distinctions inscribed in its literary sources.

    In the Hebrew narrative tradition, authors who used stories to process Israel's historical existence exploited the narrative structure inscribed in the Babylonian epics for their own purposes.  As I noted, myths traced order and patterns to the activity of deities in a timeless past, while epics told of the activities of heroes and heroines in that same timeless past.  In Israel, the Yahwist and the Elohist (so named because of the name each used to refer to God in their stories) replaced the anthropomorphic deities and heroic figures with an incompressible God who entered human history at assignable places and times in words that sent Abram, son of Terah, forth on a journey into the unknown as Abraham of Yahweh.  Since spoken words deprived Abram of the security of a tribe which defined his existence, they introduced a rupture of the natural order which cannot be traced to a sin of Adam.

        (NB:  The Yahwist authored the story of Adam and Eve.  Elsewhere, I suggest that (1) this story articulates the felt experience of individuals at a time when literacy was displacing orality as the foundation of culture and life in Israel and (2) that, in it, the Yahwist was working out the narrative strategy encoded in the story of Yahweh's covenant with Abraham.)

    Over the course of centuries, the rudimentary literary framework inscribed in the stories of the Yahwist and the Elohist accommodated many efforts to define Israel's positive and distinctive identity as God's Chosen People.  Some storytellers wove literary conventions encoded in the Babylonian epics in stories which grounded Israel's culture (identity) in the acts of archetypal individuals (Abraham, the Judges, David, Moses, temple priests, among others).  Others filled the empty literary space with stories in which the incomprehensible God dictated the Mosaic Law in theophanies, to mediate between God and individuals who complained that the promises of land, prosperity and offspring made so categorically to Abraham were endlessly deferred.  Still others told stories designed to center Israel's existence in temple worship.  Intriguingly, the contention among these storytellers forged a distinctive literary form, the prose narrative, which is alive and well today, since it guarantees that any story can be retold in ways which enrich the language of human interiority.

    The importance of this distinctive literary form is shown by the fact that individuals who lack a fertile language of human interiority cannot hope to transform their longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  To this day, however, Christians who hope to use that language fruitfully must learn how to read the Judaic-Christian Scriptures as literature, not as a repository of doctrinal formulations or as a factual account of an historical events.  Consequently, I constantly find myself fascinated with John's use of the Word as the god-term in a gospel text which provides biblical warrant for the incarnational theology which I passionately espouse and for my conviction that any Christian moral theology must be derived from the command of Jesus, "Love one another as I have love you."

The Word Incarnate

    Several weeks ago, I hope to close these reflections on the interplay between event and process with "Enough already."  But I still felt compelled to contrast the narrative structure of Israel's earliest stories with the structure of the Baltimore Catechism and the theological manuals which insisted that the fullness of revelation was given in a deposit of faith entrusted to clerics whose authority was accredited by their position in a hierarchically structured institutional Church.

    In my youth, I could not question the illusion that the truly important questions of life and the definitive answers to those questions could be found in a text which spoke with a timeless authority.  Under the spell of that illusion, I endowed pronouncements from Rome with an authority equal to that of the Scriptures and regarded heresy as the one unforgivable sin.  But that changed when I began to process my past and present experiences as a philosopher of language.  Initially, an understanding of the workings of everyday languages indebted to Wittgenstein and Ong undermined my naive belief that any text could communicate the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth if its interpretation was governed by Tradition.

    Since I had nothing to replace my lost faith, I experienced moments when I wondered if my life was a living lie.  As I wrestled with the issue, however, I came to the following conclusions:

        a.  The triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of western culture depended on the fruitfulness of languages which took on lives of their own by incorporating the uses of words for different purposes in enduring texts.  Three points merit special mention.  (1)  Prior to the advent of literacy, words functioned as events whose meaning depended on consensual validation, while words in languages generated by literary traditions are laden with many meanings.  In Wittgenstein's terms, such words are like ropes woven from many strands, without a single strand running all the way through them.  (2)  The immediacy of oral-aural communication fostered an illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  In this vein, the lack of the ability to mark significant distinctions among past, present and future perpetuated the rule of this illusion.  But the illusion was shattered by the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance, while the emerging triumph of literacy over orality led philosophers and theologians to seek a language which presented the whole of reality transparently, in depth and detail.  Presumably, this language could be consigned to a self-interpreting and self-referential text.  (The illusion fostered by the Baltimore Catechism and by the supposition that a literal reading of the Scriptures would present a word of God devoid of human interpretation.)  (3)  In this context, Wittgenstein recognized (a) that words laden with many meanings could be woven into metaphors whose reach initially exceeded their grasp, (b) that individuals who grasped the workings of literary languages projected metaphors whose reach initially exceeded their grasp, (c) that the reach was inspired by the desire to transform some longing, aspiration, insight or agenda into a realizable purpose, (d) that the distinctive purposes in question were designed to envision and realize future states of existence which differed radically from past or present cultures, (e) that the many meanings woven into these metaphors generated the sort of testable implications which allowed language-users to forge significant distinctions among wishful thinking, playful fantasies, self-serving prejudices and realizable purposes.  (4)  As the product of both the Hellenic and Hebrew literary traditions, everyday English incorporates many forms of life.  And since each form of life is designed to realize a distinctive purpose, none of them can satisfy the criteria derived from Aristotle's correspondence theory of truth.  Consequently, everyday English will forever frustrate the efforts of philosophers to extract from it an ideal language and the efforts of theologians to bridge the gap between a particular doctrinal system and the everyday experiences of Christians in changing conditions of life.     

    Sadly, few theologians realize that their efforts to endow a particular meta-narrative with authority commits them to a distinctive description of the workings of language.  For example, the meta-narrative which frames Aquinas' theology of transcendence is in turn framed by a metaphor of power and judgment.  On its part, this metaphor imposes the rule of the One on the interrogatory stance inherent in the interiorization of literacy.  In Aquinas' synthesis of theology and philosophy, this rule was inscribed as a generative principle which replaced the domain of deities and the realm of natural forces which framed the empty literary space encoded in the Babylonian epics with a distinction between a natural and a supernatural state of existence.  To supplement this replacement, Aquinas invoked a traditional metaphor of the Two Books which depicted the Book of Nature as an autonomous text authored by a rational and purposive God.  By extension, it implied that human beings created in the image of God could read off of nature a language which offered a comprehensive and precise description of the workings of natural forces by a natural light of reason.  As a result, these conceptions of God and of human beings filled the hollow center of the empty literary space projected by the Babylonian epics with a conception of reason which implied that inquiries which subjected everyday languages to analyses governed by a logical principle of identity would weave clearly formulated doctrines into a comprehensive, closed belief-system.

        (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  At the dawn of the Modern Era, neither Calvin nor Luther questioned the formative influence of metaphor of power and judgment on their efforts to eliminate the influence of Tradition on the interpretation of the Scriptures.  Both assumed that a just God inspired writers to compose the Judaic-Christian Scriptures as a text which revealed the workings of God's saving activity in human history, and both insisted that the Scriptures could be read as an immediate word of God addressed to human beings always and everywhere.  To maintain their commitment to sola Scriptura, however, they had to ignore the fact that Luther supplemented his references to the workings of divine justice with references to God's mercy, while Calvin's doctrine of eternal pre-destination eliminated such references.  On the foundational level, therefore, they failed to critique the traditional supposition that language is the voice of a rational and purposive God who entered human history as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.

        (Protestant preachers who pretend that their readings of  a written text are devoid of human interpretations continue to ignore thorny issues so dramatically evident in the contrast between Luther's willingness to grant authority to an autonomous natural order and Calvin's violent efforts to impose a "theocracy" on his compatriots.  Had their forbearers addressed these issues, the Christian tradition today might be more receptive to the language generated by an incarnational theology.)

    Today, then, I speak as a voice crying in the wilderness in a Catholic tradition dominated by defenders of doctrinal formulations and liturgical practice generated by a theology of transcendence.  Almost without exception, the ecclesiastical powers-that-be maintain that an ill-defined Tradition enshrines an interpretative code capable of extracting a comprehensive and closed doctrinal system from the flawed languages which transmit the gospel message.  Clearly, however, their formulation of the issue rests on a metaphorical reference to a deposit of faith which in turn rests on the assumption that revelation ended with the death of the last apostle and on the privileging of changelessness over change encoded in Plato's distinction between a changeless realm of ideal Forms and a flawed realm of flux.

    To bolster this assumption, they supplement their submission to the rule of the One with a metaphor of power and judgement in a way that yields a conception depicting God as Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.  And to close the hermeneutical circle, they argue (1) that attributing change to God would imply that God had previously lacked the fullness of existence and (2) that analyses of theological formulations governed by a logical principle of identity can compel assent and consent, since they are accredited by the compelling power of reason.  (In the Protestant tradition, the principle of logical identity is central to belief that the Scriptures are a self-interpreting text.  Functionally and structurally, this belief is foundational to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the related assumption that the Scriptures can be read literally.)

    In marked contrast, the incarnational theology inscribed in the hymn in the Prologue of the Gospel of John invokes an understanding (1) of the workings of everyday language encoded in the works of Ong and Wittgenstein, (2) of a code for reading the Scriptures derived from the literary form of the prose narrative and the metaphor of intimacy forged by Israel's great prophets, (3) of the doctrine of the Trinity, (4) of Scotus' references to God's overflowing love, and (5) of the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians that persists to this day.

        (The hymn could not have spoken explicitly of life within the Trinity.  The doctrine of the Trinity emerged from centuries of theological controversies, including controversies resolved by the linguistic formulation which described the incarnate Word as one person, "fully God and fully human" and, to protect the insight that Jesus was fully human, referred to Mary as the mother of God.)

    Read through this code, the hymn situates the Word at the center of life within the Trinity, the act of creation, human history and the lives of each and every human being.  Regarding the Trinity, a code derived from the metaphor of intimacy evokes readings of the hymn which enable us to understand that the three divine Persons, distinctive though they be, are so intimately involved with one another that there is only one divine life.  Regarding the act of creation, the same code places the Word at the center of the act of creation and describes that act as an outpouring of an overflowing and all-inclusive love.  Regarding the involvement of the triune God in human history and in the lives of individuals, the code reveals that, in and through the incarnate Word, each of the three divine Persons longs for deepening person-to-person involvements with every human being. 

 

    The incompatibility of this meta-narrative with a meta-narrative concerned with the activity of a rational and purposive Creator must by now be obvious.  Since the Word is central to both creation and human history, the Incarnation was an outpouring of a self-diffusive love, not a response to sin.  Since an overflowing love is creative, God is hardly changeless.  And since love urged the eternal Word to become passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with all human beings, we can trust that the incarnate Word is willing to enlist us as co-authors in the story of his involvement with humans throughout the course of human history.  Consequently, there is no changeless deposit of faith, no belief-system consisting of clear and distinct doctrinal formulations which place limits on the ways that the triune God is actively involved with individuals in the contingent events in their personal histories.  And the insistence that Jesus is the sole mediator between God and sinful humans must yield to an understanding that Jesus comes to us through one another.

    In sum, an incarnational theology implies that an understanding of the distinctive ways that each of the three divine Persons are intimately involved with unique individuals must be constantly enriched by compassionate and imaginative responses to the cries of those who are dehumanized or depersonalized by entrenched prejudices and practices which privilege the powers-that-be.  In this context, a philosophical framework indebted to Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Ong reveals, beyond question, (1) that humans are linguistic beings rather than rational animals, (2) that a conception of reason generated by the rule of the One is only one of many ways to structure revelatory inquiries, and (3) that the restructuring of thought which assured the triumph of literacy over orality in ancient Greece is very different from the restructuring of thought indebted to the Hebrew narrative tradition.

    I.e., the re-structuring of thought in ancient Greece enshrined the rule of the One.  At a time when orality and literacy vied for authority over dialogue within the city, that rule promised an escape from the threat of endless questioning, the lapse of dialogue into meaningless babble, and the danger that unrestrained might would succeed in defining values within the city.  Once the triumph of literacy was virtually assured, the rule endowed a conception of reason with the power to compel assent and consent to the descriptive and moral judgments it generated.  As honest searchers, however, early rationalists soon realized that they must find some god-term to impose closure on infinite divisibility and some changeless and enduring reality to interrupt an infinite regress.  In the process, they transformed a dialectically structured dialogue into the sort of polemically structured arguments that abound to this day in the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.

    Here, the postmodernist desire to subvert authority in any shape or form raises an intriguing question. "Whose voice is language?"  In their answer to this question, rationalists decree that language is the voice of reason and, by extension, that reason speaks with authority.  In Aquinas' synthesis of philosophy and theology, language was the voice of a rational, purposive and just Creator and, by extension, that the authority of this Creator could not be questioned.  But an incarnational theology offers a very different answer.  Framed by the literary form of the prose narrative, it subjects the implications of the metaphor of intimacy to tests designed to show whether the longing for ever-deepening person-to-person involvements can be transformed into a realizable quest.  And as a theological discourse, it explores the intensely personal involvement of each of the divine Persons in the lives of each and every human being.  And in the end, it views language as the voice of a longing for a fully human and uniquely personal existence and for deepening person-to-person involvements with loved ones.

    This answer emerges from analyses of the interplay between theological discourse and everyday experiences designed to illuminate significant distinctions among interactions which respect, silence or violate an elusive longing for intensely personal involvements with God and other unique individuals.  To hear this voice, honest searchers must acquire a language which enables them to process their experiences in depth and detail.  If they do, they cannot help but see the workings of a will to power in doctrinal formulations which promise an authoritative definition of the saving activity of an incomprehensible God in the lives of unique individuals endowed with a mysterious freedom.

    As a working hypothesis, therefore, I suggest that language is the voice of an elusive longing for intimacy.  In so doing, I may seem to enter a philosophical arena which promises that, ultimately, one god-term will vanquish the contending god-terms exposed by the question, "Whose voice is language?"  As a god-term, however, the longing for intimacy generates a language which subverts the authority of moral discourses grounded outside of or in some abstract conception of human reality without re-inscribing authority in any shape or form.  As a well-tested discourse, this language can evoke that longing and enable language-users to process experience in ways that transform the longing into never-ending quest.

    In sum, a language capable of delineating the never fully realizable quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence invites one to identify one's own longing for intimacy and to commit oneself to a shared journey with one or more unique individuals.  And these calls must not be presented as commands, norms, laws, principles or formulae, since each of the latter inscribe a hidden will to power.

Summary

    The metaphor of intimacy implies (1) that human beings are passionate, imaginative, linguistic and purposive individuals, not rational animals, (2) that these four traits operate inseparably in the vulnerable and respectful self-revelations which enable lovers to move through silent or dramatic struggles to new life in each other's love, and (3) this inseparable operation plays a crucial role in the ability of unique individuals to co-author a shared journey into the unknown.

    This description makes no pretense of being a comprehensive definition of human reality or delineation of a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  Indeed, it guarantees that no such definition or delineation is possible.  Here, the story of Jesus, the incarnate Word, provides the clearest possible example.  As the language of discernment generated by an incarnational theology shows, Jesus willingly comes to us through one another.  First and foremost, his statement, "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me", reveals his intimate involvement with every human being.  By extension, it voices his call to co-author his life-story with him, reveals conclusively that the unfolding of his story depends on how we respond to that call, and heightens our awareness of our mysterious freedom.  (To heighten that awareness, Fr. Philotheus Boehner would remind students that they could say No to God.)