The Dish

Are our present joys linked, in some inextricable way, to “some mass atrocity that was committed in the past”? Philosophy professor Peter Atterton considers (NYT) how historical injustices affect our existence today:

Nietzsche once surmised that anyone who had ever wanted to relive a moment of joy was committed to affirming the idea of reliving the entirety of his or her life up to that point. Why? Because Nietzsche, a dyed-in-the-wool determinist, believed that the present instant of joy is made possible by all the events in one’s past that caused it. As he lyrically put it, “All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love.” For Nietzsche this is a splendid thing, for it gives us the power to redeem the past. … I had always solaced myself with Nietzsche’s idea of looking back at one’s life and affirming all of it, even the bad parts, which are indispensable conditions for whatever happiness my life currently contains, until one day it dawned on me that if I am to say “yes” to those events in the past that caused me to suffer but which are causally necessary for my life’s being lived as I live it now, then I must also say “yes” to those events that have caused others to suffer as well.

But who can do this? Who can maintain in good conscience that the Holocaust or slavery was justified because otherwise he or she, or anyone else currently living for that matter, wouldn’t have been born. (Nietzsche notoriously maintained that the only justification of the French Revolution — including the Reign of Terror — was that it produced Napoleon.) Whose natural narcissism is so extreme that he or she can justify the unjustifiable suffering of innumerable innocent lives? The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was more discerning: “What is most natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?”

Looking back at the writing and publication of his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie recalls the advice he received from the editor and poet Jonathan Galassi – “Go deeper. You need to go deeper”:

I asked him what he meant, and he explained, roundabout but in such a way as to draw clear lines between the literary text and all the other kinds of writing that washed up against the pilings of our office. What I’d written was too journalistic. It made too much of superficial connections. It was boosterish in style—it was trying to put the idea of a “school” of American Catholic writing over on us instead of trusting the material. And (again, all this was conveyed indirectly) it didn’t get to the bottom of what made these people a school, or what made them Catholic writers, or what made them Catholics at all, or why what they believed mattered to them or us.

Roger Straus liked it too—and Jonathan and FSG signed up the book. And day and night for a thousand days and nights I sought to go deeper, starting by moving my point of entry into the story back nearly half a century—to the moments where those four writers themselves turned, in their different ways, to literature and to religious belief in their own efforts to go deeper. And somewhere in the middle of those thousand days and nights, I concluded that the experience of depth—intellectual, emotional, spiritual depth—is the central literary experience. It is what makes literature literature, and what makes us read literature, and write it.

“Go deeper.” It’s not advice a writer can outgrow or set aside as unnecessary. Augustine asked, “Who understands his sins?” Likewise, what writer can truly say, “I’ve gone deep enough”?

Asher Elbein visited Toco Hills, a “Modern Orthodox enclave nestled near the edge of Midtown Atlanta,” and found that for many observent members of the community, it’s a struggle to make ends meet:

The stereotype that Jews are wealthy—or at least comfortably middle class—has long ignored the truth that many are struggling to get by. And Orthodox Jews, who often have higher living expenses than other Jews due to their observance and the limited choices they face when looking for a place to live, are especially vulnerable to shifts in the economic climate. For [Rabbi Ilan] Feldman, dealing with the correlation between religious observance and financial hardship is part of his job. “For someone making $60,000 a year, in America, that’s middle class,” Feldman said. “But in this Orthodox community, $60,000 means you aren’t going to make it.”

Elbein talked to people in the community about what keeps them connected to Toco Hills:

For [Tzivia] Silverstein, it comes down to value instead of cost. In terms of personal and spiritual fulfillment, she says, the neighborhood pays for itself. As heavy as the expenses are, they are necessary sacrifices for belonging to the community. “I see maybe one movie a year,” she said. “I choose to put my kids through religious school instead of buying a nicer car. It’s astounding, the amount of money that other people have, to spend on things like renovating their house or buying a bigger TV. To me, my most important relationship is with God. The material world is a means to an end.”

In an interview with Gary Gutting, philosophy professor Michael Ruse explains (NYT) why he doesn’t think evolution and theism are incompatible:

G.G.: Do you think that evolution lends support to the atheistic argument from evil: that it makes no sense to think that an all-good, all-powerful God would have used so wasteful and brutal a process as evolution to create living things?

M.R.: Although in some philosophy of religion circles it is now thought that we can counter the argument from evil, I don’t think this is so. More than that, I don’t want it to be so. I don’t want an argument that convinces me that the death under the guillotine of Sophie Scholl (one of the leaders of the White Rose group opposed to the Nazis) or of Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen ultimately contributes to the greater good. If my eternal salvation depends on the deaths of these two young women, then forget it.

This said, I have never really thought that the pains brought on by the evolutionary process, in particular the struggle for survival and reproduction, much affect the Christian conception of God. … If God is to do everything through unbroken law, and I can think of good theological reasons why this should be so, then pain and suffering are part of it all. Paradoxically and humorously I am with Dawkins here. He argues that the only way naturally you can get the design-like features of organisms — the hand and the eye — is through evolution by natural selection, brought on by the struggle. Other mechanisms just don’t work. So God is off the hook.

Rowan Williams offers a glimpse into his prayer life, which features meditative repetition of the Jesus Prayer – “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner” – along with physical disciplines, such as sitting and breathing in certain ways, all with the aim of “bringing the mind into the heart”:

The interest in uniting words with posture and breath is, of course, typical of non-Christian practices also; and over the years increasing exposure to and engagement with the Buddhist world in particular has made me aware of practices not unlike the “Jesus Prayer” and introduced me to disciplines that further enforce the stillness and physical focus that the prayer entails. Walking meditation, pacing very slowly and co-ordinating each step with an out-breath, is something I have found increasingly important as a preparation for a longer time of silence.

So: the regular ritual to begin the day when I’m in the house is a matter of an early rise and a brief walking meditation or sometimes a few slow prostrations, before squatting for 30 or 40 minutes (a low stool to support the thighs and reduce the weight on the lower legs) with the “Jesus Prayer”: repeating (usually silently) the words as I breathe out, leaving a moment between repetitions to notice the beating of the heart, which will slow down steadily over the period.

The prayer isn’t any kind of magical invo­cation or auto-suggestion – simply a vehicle to detach you slowly from distracted, wandering images and thoughts. These will happen, but you simply go on repeating the words and gently bringing attention back to them. If it is proceeding as it should, there is something like an indistinct picture or sensation of the inside of the body as a sort of hollow, a cave, in which breath comes and goes, with an underlying pulse. If you want to speak theologically about it, it’s a time when you are aware of your body as simply a place where life happens and where, therefore, God “happens”: a life lived in you.

(Image: Christ the Redeemer by Andrei Rublev, 1410, via Wikimedia Commons)