Kafka in 'An Old Manuscript' wrote:
"A screeching of jackdaws is always in our ears. Our way of living and our institutions they neither understand nor care to understand. And so they are unwilling to make sense even out of our sign language. You can gesture at them till you dislocate your jaws and your wrists and still they will not have understood you and will never understand."
This quote will appear like an insult but it is not intended as such.
In simple terms, the scientific/materialist project and its new paradigms and predicates, undermined the fable on which classical religious ideation was and is based. Religion had invaded realms of knowledge that it should not have, and yet it was inevitable, and has been an inevitability in all cultures, that this occur. The last 3-400 years has marked a process of vast advances by materialist method (how else to call it?) and a continued retreat of the religious camp back to the only tenable position: God, divinity, whatever one wishes to call it, is essentially an affair of the inner man, and the relationship to a conscious universal being is one of personal attunement within moral, ethical, feeling-level zones of human perception. There has been a colossal shift in how perceiving structures within man have been organised. This is revolutionary change and such has been the last dynamic period, starting roughly in the 17th century.
To trace this history, and these processes, and to understand what happened and how excruciatingly difficult this has been, is essentially the proposal of Willey's book 'The Seventeenth Century Background'. And the whole purpose of bringing it forward was to inspire an honest examination.
And - at least according to Willey in another book by him, 'Christianity Then and Now' - this has certainly been for the best as far as European Christianity is concerned. Why? Because it pushes back the domain of knowledge of God, and relationship to God, into the purely inner zone of the inner man. In this sense the only concern of religion, and of Christianity (which is essentially the unstated focus of these battles), should now be, and perhaps really only is, in what could be called a 'Kierkegaardian' relationship to the entire existential question. Yet it seems very true, at least from where I sit, that you cannot ask that level of personal commitment from anyone, not these days and perhaps never. I am not sure that I have it, though my spiritual life has been vitally relevant and my efforts now are extensions of it.
The conversation on the topic of the retreat of theology from all domains except the inner, moral domain (where
else can God be discovered except in the soul, in the spirit, in the heart, in one's existential and living relationship to Life?), is a very interesting conversation. It seems to be both a win and a loss. There is no longer the overarching and inarguable Divine Presence (accepted by all axiomatically, as a given) overseeing the world as there was in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, yet it seems necessary that the toppling of a domination by the Scholastic mind, and a Scholastic power-structure, should have occurred. No one could sanely propose an alternative.
But theology has not abandoned God or divinity nor relationship to the divine, and this relationship in one form or another is now, has been, and will always be part of man's life and his concern. In the upper echelons, religion and religiousness will undergo the revolutions in perspective and will adapt (has adapted largely) to the changes imposed by history and evolution of conceptual structures. It really already has and there is a new(er) face of theology. A large segment, a vast population really, will flounder in a middle-zone because they do not now have and will not likely ever have the conceptual strength to grasp the historical shift, and they will not be able to grasp 'predicates' and 'metaphysics' and how overarching ideas and perception shift, phenomenologically, over time. They may indeed 'lose their religion' but they will gain and become captivated by a wide range of substitute influences. This is something to become aware of: the incapacity of large groups of people to make such dramatic changes without 'guidance'.
Here, on this forum, right now, I suggest that we read the ideas and opinions of people who are really mostly in this middle zone, the zone of the mass and the mass-mind. I would like to believe that some years of university education actually educate, and yet I know better. It does not. It disturbs the fabrics of the inner man, it installs new, partial predicates, it indoctrinates in the sense that Sthita mentioned, and it creates a sort of Walmart Man, this being of course the New World species but Europe most certainly is producing a similar version. Again, when I repeat: 'You can gesture at them till you dislocate your jaws and your wrists and still they will not have understood you and will never understand', this is not cruel sarcasm but a very sad fact of all that has been lost in these battles, the battles of the last 300+ years.
To understand, now, what 'God' means requires a plunging in, it requires an initiation experience, and this is not brought about by talk. Curiously, and I will say this more or less strictly about Christianity, the religiousness that can be said to be 'truly Christian' is in a very similar position as it was at the start of the era: it is seen and understood as a form of madness. To say 'I am in a relationship to a divine potency that is morally remaking me' (which is what one should really say) is, nowadays, a nutty statement. Isn't only madmen who have that sort of 'inner relationship' to *something* that is not material, and that is like a 'voice' they hear? We all know how untenable that sort of 'relationship' can be. Some people have more of an 'inner relationship' with their TV ... but that is another story.
More or less this is what I have gotten out of these 'conversations'. On one side, a near complete inability to grasp what is being talked about, or what might be talked about, and a focus exclusively - and with some justice - on the ground that religion has surrendered. We indeed live in a manifestation of material energies which can be navigated strictly on the basis of our manipulations of that matter. It is entirely possible to live in the conceptual world that *sees* only that and has no other concerns or interests. But when it comes to *higher things* and to upper-echelon levels of meaning, and to meaning in higher senses, and perhaps to 'sensitivity' if it is appropriate to use that word, one enters automatically another domain of activity, and perception.
To conceive a 'world' of meaning as is represented in the play Macbeth, and to feel that, and to live through some process like that, is what I am referring to (though Lear's transformation is perhaps more apt to represent a Christian
metanoia and transformation-regeneration, but
certainly difficult and painful!) It is an example that is close to hand and so I refer to it. To talk on this level though requires
hearers ('eyes' essentially) of a different order. In any case, these are my conclusions, and this is what I take away, largely, from these failures of discourse. But since I am committed to gain even in total failure, it has been pure gain, and for that gain I am thankful.
