Questions to a monk from a poet #2:
And do you account for the pervasiveness of secular skepticism, or is enough to encounter it among your parishioners as you do other cries for help, other ailments and woundedness, from the bulwarks of the monastery where certitude is the protected path to the sacred? Is there anyone among you who can speak to the skeptic from the inside out, not as a believer who has always believed, but as a believer who chooses to believe despite a longstanding, still-encroaching experience and education of doubt?
The believer who has always believed, I think, often finds such skepticism morally loathsome, philosophically untenable or "ideological," impractical, delusional, demonic (in the sense that it inverts divine logic: i.e. Reality for realities), and diseased. And yet, this is precisely the viewpoint, rhetoric, and feeling of most unbelieving, altruistic, politically liberal, educated parents, teachers, and artists I know towards Catholicism and the Church, or at least towards fundamentalist Christianities: that Christianity as it is (and has been) lived out is ethically problematic, philosophically untenable, far too ideological, impractical, delusional ("brainwashed"), demonic (in the sense that it distorts the good to appropriate it for its position and power, i.e. the exclusive "tyranny" of objective moral and philosophical Reality versus the inclusiveness of diversified views), and, yes, diseased.
I'm watching such terms get wielded all around where the stakes seem very high and where the conversation dissolves into positioning and sometimes educated name-calling (aren't we all of us ideologists?), and I wonder if it is (or isn't) the Christian response to take very seriously--philosophically as well as theologically--the formidable intelligence behind contemporary secular skepticism. --Not Marx: that's old hat and you've been doing it since Vatican II while the rest of the world has stretched the usefulness of Kant and Marx and Freud and Nietzsche into the politically invested, language-oriented psychoanalytics of Kristeva and Lacan, or into Derrida's deconstructed canons, or into Foucault's archeologies of history. These are brilliantly compelling ventures into the post-Enlightenment aftermath where it seems what we have left to us is a self-sufficient righting of the world. In some ways we've become kinder for it. And we like to think we are global thinkers--even if we're not--so monasticism strikes the secular world as quaint, romantic, sheltered, and old-worldly. I know it isn't, you know it isn't, but I'm not sure I can explain: in what way is monasticism's purpose and meaning contemporary? Is it really enough to revert to medieval thought--Aristotle, metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas--without engaging it in all these theoretical territories (risen and influential since Vatican II) if you're to talk to the secularists who live here?
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