Advent Women 6

In intellectual disciplines and in the enjoyment of art and nature we discover value in our ability to forget self, to be realistic, to perceive justly. We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real... The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair... It is a task to come to see the world as it is.

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

I remember reading an interview with a philosopher many years ago, perhaps Barthes or Foucault, and they mentioned reading The Dialectic of Enlightenment - a very passionately written and hypnotic work. Their comment was though that it did not significantly affect them because by the time they had read it they were beyond the age of "intellectual discoveries". 

The phrase stayed with me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it disturbed me that you reached an age where you no longer made "intellectual discoveries" and secondly because I understood what he meant by it and it's a good phrase. Because there are some things you read which affect you profoundly - that significantly change the way you think. It may be an odd conjugation of life events and current affairs, a girlfriend or a city, or a teacher - but certain books in the right circumstances change you, form you even. It turns out he was right as well about getting beyond the age. It's not that you don't keep learning or expanding how you see the world, but the really dramatic formational intellectual moments, I suspect, run parallel to our emotional development and experience of the world. When the mind is least formed on subjects it has the greatest potential for growth and change. Be careful what you read in your early twenties...

Anyway I only thought of this because reading the above book reminded me so much of Don Mackinnon, who I found very formative in my early twenties. Turns out he taught Murdoch yonks ago. Clearly they both liked Cezanne. Speaking of Mackinnon, I was told once by someone who knew him, how his wife had once come home, gone upstairs and found his trousers on the bed. She ran downstairs ready to call the police because she thought her husband had finally lost the plot and gone out without his trousers. Eventually he turned up at home and it turns out he'd bought himself a new pair of trousers. "Nice anecdote" I hear you cry! But it does kind of suggest that actually Mackinnon just wore the same pair of trousers every day without fail for years. Which is a bit odd. I guess they didn't have H&M in those days.

Well I thought I'd put in Iris today since she fits very well with Weil and Rose. The same emphasis on attention and acceptance, the same intellectual curiosity, here in relation to art. What is beginning to strike me about all these female writers (which I'm choosing more or less at random) is their ability to stick with difficulty and a certain sense of renunciation, in a way which is not so evident in male writing. 

Anyway I liked Murdoch's essays because they are really about transcendence, even though she is reticent or even hostile towards God. Secularizing Plato doesn't work but she does describe the task of the philosopher and writer really very well. People are often averse to these concepts today. Culturally speaking it's very easy to be lazy, to accept the dominant mythologies, to listen only to familiar music, to give up on morality and to stop believing in better and worse. The people who criticise these things equally often end up sounding like snobs, conservatives and hypocrites. Especially if their defense is based on formality: the opera is the right place to go, getting married is the right thing to do. Murdoch is pointing to a realism, which requires us make the effort to see the world as it is; that achieving depth - in relationships, in appreciation of art, in discerning the right thing to do - is a task. It is difficult. That's why her primary enemies in the essay are scientists (who think everything can be explained simply by cause and effect [determinism]) and existentialists (who believe it's all about an abstract 'will' that has freedom to do whatever, whenever rather than learning to see the world truthfully). The frailties of our egos and wandering attentions will always distract us from this task, but the pursuit of perfection remains the goal of the soul. Humankind cannot bear very much reality but 'the humble man (sic), because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are'.

Advent Women 5

Let me then be destroyed. For that is the only way I may have a chance of surviving. Let those feelings uniquely called forth by sexual love, my life's passion and pain, my learnt desirability figured out of my primeval undesirability, let them prevail. Now I am not dissociated from my ululation. I hear the roaring and the roasting and know that it is I. Resist the telephone! Even though help is only a few digits away. For the first time, I say "No" to any alleviation, to the mean of friendship, to the endlessly inventive love of my sisters. I don't want to be justified. Keep your mind in hell and . . . I want to sob and sob . . . until the prolonged shrieking becomes a shout of joy.

"Loss" means that the original gift and salvation of love have been degraded: love's arrow poisoned and sent swiftly back to the heart. My time-worn remedy has been to pluck the arrow and to prove the wound, testing its resources with protestant concentration. This time I want to do it differently. You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. So what if I die. Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace. That I may desire again. I would be the Lover, am barely the Beloved.

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

A couple of weeks ago I took Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle on retreat with me. Fortunately I had other books with me for in the end I only read one and a half chapters because it is such hard going. Every now and again you get some encouragement, but most of the time the strain of reading is immense. I've fought through Hegel, I didn't have the heart for Heidegger, but I feel I should continue with Rose, if only because she has influenced this generation of theologians so much. It's a bloody hard business though. I met up with my old tutor from theological college the other day who wrote her phd on Rose. She claims that Rose is playing with you. I didn't find this particularly encouraging. 

She has written more accessible books though and Love's Work is deceptively accessible for the depth it contains. Similar in tone is her unfinished, posthumous Paradiso, in which she defines the philosopher's task as one of 'eros', 'attention' and 'acceptance'. Eros by which she means intellectual curiosity; attention as in careful concentration; and acceptance as a refusal to make an easy closed-off conclusion - to remain with the problems and conflicts without seeking a way out. The passage above shows how her attitude to love and sex bears the same marks. The eros is pronounced, the passion, the ululation, the shriek and sob; but so is the attention - the rapt concentration of feeling, the honesty of self-assessment, the awareness and analysis; but finally it is the 'acceptance' that is most striking. Refusing to call friends or sisters, staying with the pain, refusing distraction or lies of denial. The refusal of consolation - to 'prove the wound'. The reward is to discover what I want and fear from love, for love not to be diminished and cheapened. 

Many years ago I spent several months with St John of the Cross, endlessly reading the poems and prose. The intention at the time was academic but I gained an interesting spiritual insight. St John teaches a sort of detachment. Not in a not caring way, what might be called indifference, but more like what Rose here calls 'acceptance' (T. S. Eliot takes this up in 'Little Gidding' in the hedgerow and St Julian: All shall be well, and/ All manner of thing shall be well.). The point is that if we can let things go we are freed from the anxiety, the weight of our fragility. Reading him this became I kind of prayer - I looked at what I was most terrified of - for me beginning with things like losing my job, my vocation, mobility, vision, the ability to read, to communicate, enduring unassailable discomfort. It was a sort of process of burning away, meditating upon fear until it dissolved; staying with pain and humiliation rather than running from it. Imaginatively I came to a place of assurance where I truly felt that whatever my conditions I could live in the simplicity of what remained of my mind and its relationship with God.

In a sense this is very close to a negative form of control. When I am on trains and planes I usually spend some time imagining they crash and thinking through my actions. This is of course an idle fantasy and a sort of anxiety displacement exercise. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about acceptance - that whatever comes to be the case, it will be ok, or in Rose's celebrated borrowing: 'keep your mind in hell and despair not' (or as Jessie J profoundly reminds us: 'It's ok not to be ok'). This will be tested in greater depth of course. Most of us will endure the slow decline to the body's end, when our assurance is tested. Only time will tell the success of our preparations. Rose was struggling with the cancer that finally killed her as she wrote this work. The great success of it is that she articulates a theology, a spirituality, of suffering, of abiding with conflicts in love and friendship, of staying with the problems of philosophy and politics, and of bearing with the reality of suffering and not turning away:

[New age spiritualities] burden the individual soul with an inner predestination: you have eternal life only if you dissolve the difficulty of living, of love, of self and other, of the other in the self, if you are translucid, without inner or outer boundaries. If you lead a normally unhappy life, you are predestined to eternal damnation, you will not live.

This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

Advent Women 2

Christianity should contain all vocations without exception since it is catholic. In consequence the Church should also. But in my eyes Christianity is catholic by right but not in fact. So many things are outside it, so many things that I love and do not want to give up, so many things that God loves, otherwise they would not be in existence... Christianity being catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time, but for my whole life if need be...

(Simone Weil, Spiritual Autobiography)

As T. S. Eliot said, while everything Weil writes is worth reading, we might not always follow her arguments to their conclusions. What defines her work though is a honesty that is as sharp as a quadro-blade Gilette razor ("The Best a Man Can Get"). Absolutely everything is cut through - ideology, politics, pragmatism, doctrine, received wisdom - even if it seems pretty or pleasant or just necessary to get along, it is tested, whittled, sliced until every inch of paradox, hypocrisy and superstition is filed to a stump. But you can still hear the love. The desire for total inclusion. The solidarity with any misshapen lump that might have been overlooked. 

It's unclear whether she was baptised. If so, like Gillian Rose, a similar figure, it was a death-bed baptism. But what more powerful sign of Christian redemption could there be than a refusal of a sacrament in solidarity with those whom the Church has not recognised but are full of the grace of God?

It's an interesting conundrum. Whatever you think, though, Weil is a prophetic voice of truth that dared to cut itself against doctrine and it's voices like these that continue to call the Church to account and make it anywhere close to being worthy of the name.