this week I wrestle again with secularism.
reading maccabees again, I am struck by the way in which, although the jews fight the greeks with sword and rage, the book is written in a greek way: as though the greekness they were raging against had actually seeped in like water.
so it is with western secularism. we fight it in vain, and yet not to fight it is to succumb and thereby lose everything.
the book I am reading will influence my style today:
gift of rain, tan twan eng.
I am reminded that I could not have returned to my christian roots without long eastern detours.
there is a deep hole in western thinking which cannot otherwise be filled.
I am wondering why I could not read that book on zen by merton. something made me put it down after the fewest of pages.
although we need zen, we can never write about it in a western way without destroying its very essence. we need it to defeat our dangerous obsession with reason but there is something in the way in which we write which only reinforces what needs to be weakened.
the present crisis between theism and atheism is all based on western fallacies. the principles which underlie our way of thinking are so deeply-rooted that they cannot be weeded out without destroying almost everything.
our obsession with completeness. we look for it everywhere and find it nowhere, and, because we cannot find it, we invent it. circles and triangles and rectangles: all completed. like walls of a fortress. they keep us safe by keeping the real truth out, because the real truth, although we seek it quite honestly, is too dangerous to allow in. the real truth actually destroys any possibility of completeness. so we can have completeness or we can have truth but we cannot have both. by our obsession with completeness we make truth an enemy.
our desire to know everything is perhaps just greed in disguise.
am I writing nonsense? is this just 'clever' talk of the most useless kind or is it something important that needs to be said and remembered?
not enough is made of the western problem of dualism perhaps.
my own sense is that it is only the christian way that can free us from our innate dualism, and yet, of course, our greek way of seeing the world constantly reinforces that same dualism, and inevitably then through the added christian lens, which thus contradicts and potentially destroys the very essence of the christian way. (just like maccabees)
although I would not be able to explain it right now (if ever) I am dimly aware here that it is resurrection and eucharist that are the western man's only way out of death-filled dualism. and here of course I must throw up my hands and admit that I am fulfilling the western curse. (is that too strong a term?)
zen cannot be understood through straight western prose, however all-inclusive you try to make it . . . . it isnt a question of being all-inclusive or all-encompassing, or even of being intricately detailed in a salinger kind of way, although he does get close don't you think?
what am I getting at?
music as complete package: beethoven, sibelius, [or even mozart although in a much more instinctive way]. philosophy as complete package.
I have long accepted that philosophy is always set to fail.
why?
because it must always be the triangle, the circle, the rectangle: which ultimately keeps the philosopher safe inside and the dangerous truth that he is really seeking firmly on the outside. even in his moment of triumph his main hope is being extinguished.
more later I think