There are few figures in life or literature that we encounter that we could describe as truly full-spectrum human beings. In English literature surely Shakespeare and Dickens qualify, but there's something about the Russians, and preeminent among them are Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, but especially Dostoyevski. I read somewhere that Tolstoy at first found Dostoyevski repellent because his writing was so rough around the edges, but in the end came to see him as the more profound writer.
When we think of Dostoyevski, we usually think about the guy who is searching out the darker corners of the human soul as in Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot, Devils, but his great masterpiece is The Brothers Karamazovwhere the full spectrum is explored from the highest heights to the lowest depths.
So I've been reading Charles Taylor's new book, Cosmic Connections, for the last week--side by side with Julius Evola, but more on that another time--and around page 180 Taylor has a reflective interlude in which he talks about a passage in The Brother Karamazov that I had forgotten. Here's what he says about it-
Take for example the experience described in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazovwhich Staretz Zossima ascribes to his deceased brother Markel: “All around me there has been such divine glory: birds, trees, meadows, sky, and I alone have lived in disgrace, I alone have dishonoured it all, completely ignoring its beauty and glory.” Here the sense of the larger world doesn’t really have the characteristics of a cosmic order, but rather an overpowering sense of its central meaning; here, joy. And at the same time, its revelation is not something which the agent as poet brings about. Of course, the description the author gives helps define the experience, but it breaks in on him/herunbidden.
Taylor talks about such experiences as introducing those who have it into a wider space, a space where our desires and fears are not central, a space in which we experience a disorienting, de-centering shift that demands that we understand our place in the world and our relationship to it in a completely different way. He goes on--
At the same time, this wider space requires something of us. It asks that we respond to it with joy. So Markel reproaches himself for his past blindness, which ignored and disvalued this glory. “Birds of God, birds of joy, you must forgive me too, for against you too I have sinned.”
When his mother remonstrates with him, “You take too many sins on yourself,” he replies: “But dear mother, … I am crying from joy, not from grief; I want to be guilty before them, only I cannot explain it to you, for I do not know how to love them. Let me be culpable before all, and then all will forgive me, and that will be paradise. Am I not in paradise now? (pp. 185-86).
Dostoyevski is so great because so richly human. The joy reveals both the grandeur at the heart of things and our sense of our smallness--sinfullness?--in the face of it. And it's ok. It's a grandeur that both enlarges us and diminishes us. We see our smallness in this larger space, and so with it the diminishment of all the things that seem otherwise so important to us. But it's ok because in such experiences you feel the deep connectedness of it all, that you are what you are and it's enough, we’re no big deal, and it's perfect that that’s the way it is. In the end, it's the sense of connection and joy in communion that's the only thing that matters. That's why I tell my students that King Lear isn't really a tragedy. It’s a story of deep alienation overcome in the achievement of deep communion.
And so it's ok that this direct knowledge of such grandeur and joy cannot last, and that we will return to our blindness and stupidity, and that we will likely forget the significance of such moments as they recede in memory. And that's ok too. Because it's important to know that because we are humans we have the capacity to be gifted with such moments. And even if one isn't feeling particularly connected, we have good reason to hope that such a connection is possible.
I don't know about you, but when I read the Psalms or hear them sung, I often wondered what all the thanking is about. I’ve heard all the platitudes, and they don’t stick. I have gone through periods in my life when I felt that when you stack up all the stuff to be thankful about next to all things not to be, the latter makes the much bigger pile. So what are they so friggin' thankful about, and how does that relate to me? The very question is a symptom of the problem--which is to be stuck in the question 'how is this about me?'
Because the people who are most deeply thankful are those who have had such 'de-centering' experiences and realize that it isn't about me, none of it, and yet it's ok, deeply, deeply ok. And all the thanking in the Psalms as they are sung through the centuries is, if nothing else, a way to stay faithful to the memory of such decentering experiences. That's why we have ritual. It's a way to remember and to reenact, i.e., to keep alive in memory a truth that we dare not dishonor or forget.
So the metaphysics part--what do I mean by that? Well, let me ask you: : What moments in your experience have been most powerful in informing your sense about what’s most deeply real? Are they the sometimes seemingly endless days and weeks and years of strife, anxiety, overwork, and boredom? Or are they these rare epiphanies? Is it the quantity of our experience that counts or the quality moments we experience far less frequently? Do such rare moments of joy, clarity, and light balance out all the years of pain, confusion, and murk? Each has to answer in his or her own way, but my guess is that if you're still reading here, you would say that quality matters more than quantity. We'd all like a larger quantities of the otherwise scarce quality, but, again, it's ok.
Taylor rejects interpreting such epiphanic experiences in a reductively subjective and psychological way. He insists they tell us something about the nature of things because the decentering of the experience itself insists that something more than our subjectivity is involved here. But the problem lies in that there is no compelling underlying story, i.e., no metaphysics, to help us understand the significance of such experiences, and too often no ritual that works that would help us to honor and remember them. And so too often over time such experiences fade in experience and wane in the significance they should have in shaping our lives.
So the task in his book is to ask whether a metaphysics in a postmodern key can be extrapolated from such experiences . I think it can be. That was essentially the argument I was making in the Cathedral Talks. It's not about coming up with a new doctrine or argument, but rather, in following the great Romantic poets, it’s about enacting a shift in the way that we interpret our experience. This leads eventually to the development of a story that makes sense in a way that does not contradict what we know from science but at the same time offers explanations that are adequate to what these epiphanies demand. I think this happens all the time for individuals, but could it happen in a way that has broader, solidarity-building, cultural significance?
Here's how Taylor describes what he wants to do:
One of the threads I am trying to follow in this book is the evolution of the human longing for reconnection, first to cosmic orders, traditionally conceived, and later, to the order of Nature which modern science has helped define for us; along with this, I want to trace the media in which reconnection has been sought in literature, starting with the Romantic poetry of the nineteenth century, and turning toward hybrid forms of writing, informed by science.
All the while, spiritual traditions nourished by different visions of transcendence have been continued, modified, and added to. These two histories have been related in complex ways; but it would not help to lose sight of the difference between them. Hence the present note.
This is the more important for me because I nourish another perhaps impossible ambition: I would like to cast light on the continuities and differences between the different modes and conceptions of cosmic connection throughout human history, including the special forms that we find in early tribal religions, which are so hard to understand for those immersed in contemporary global civilization. (p. 190).
After writing an important book about the disenchantment of the world, at the end of his life now, he's written one about how we might re-enchant it.
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See also my piece on Adam Gopnik’s review of Taylor’s book in The New Yorker here.
Also Matt Schmitz, the co-founder of Compact Magazine with Sohrab Ahmari, has a piece in the NY Times today about J.D. Vance and these pesky reactionary Catholics about whom I’ve been writing for a few weeks now. BTW, that’s what led me to start reading Julius Evola (1898-1974). He’s the guy who laid the philosophical foundation for these guys, and largely the inspiration for the revolution that they see themselves engaged in.