From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Sun Sep 04 2005 - 17:37:17 BST
Sam,
That was an interesting post to Ian and Maggie explaining how the MOQ can be
compared with your understanding of Christianity. Here are some comments
you might like to keep in mind:
Firstly, there appears to be one or two internal contradictions in your
“MOQ- Christianity” comparison.
At one point you state:
“I see religious language as necessarily bound up with social context,
[religions] can't be understood apart from the social context, and, to a
very great extent, they are concerned with the structuring and maintenance
of the social order. Religious language gains its meaning from its use in
the various local language games that make up the practice of religious
faith… Religious language can be oriented in three ways: suppression of
level 2 patterns, maintenance of level 3 patterns, and enabling of level 4
patterns. I think different religions can be evaluated on the basis of how
well they do these three things.”
However, near the end of your post to Ian, you also state:
“The mystical path I see as the cultivation of level 4. That's what I see
Christianity as all about.”
i.e. it seems that, in the first paragraph, you are stating that religion is
primarily a "level three" concern and then, in the second paragraph, you are
implying that it is primarily a concern for "level four". Moreover, I’ve
never seen any mysticism in any of the hundreds of Christian services or
religious education lessons that I’ve attended over the last 30 years.
Though I’m pleased to finally read that a Christian minister is stating that
Christianity is all about the “mystical path” – you might like to suggest to
your Bishop that the Church has a re-think of how the “mystical path”
message might be presented and promoted to the masses. However, from what I
always understood of the Christian Church it seems closer to Northrop’s
“Platonic” understanding than your “mystical path”. As indicated by the
following section from his “The Logic of the Humanities & Sciences”, 1947,
pages 376 to 377:
“The divine object in the West is an unseen God the Father. This means that
He cannot be known by the aesthetic intuition after the manner of the divine
being of the Orient. Christ tells us that His kingdom is not of this world.
St. Paul asserts that the things that are seen are temporal and that it is
only the things which are unseen which are eternal. All the theistic
religions affirm in addition that the determinate personality is immortal.
Certainly this is not true of the self given with immediacy in the aesthetic
intuition. As Plato, Hume and Kant in the West and the Hinayanistic
Buddhists in the East have noted, and as is evident to common sense, all
immediately apprehended personalities pass away. Thus it is obvious that if
a religion is going to affirm the doctrine of the immortality of the
determinate personality the real in knowledge must be identified not with
the self given with immediacy in the aesthetic intuition but with a self
inferred from the immediately apprehended self. Similarly, there is no
immediately apprehended form in nature as a whole, which is immortal. Thus
if the divine is to be a determinate being embracing more than man it is
with a determinate factor inferred from the immediately apprehended and not
with the immediately apprehended alone that the divine must be identified.”
“Let us call the immediately apprehended factor in knowledge and reality
the aesthetic component, and the unseen inferred factor, the theoretic
component. Oriental religion then becomes defined as one which identifies
the divine with the timeless factor in the aesthetic component. Western
religion becomes similarly defined as one which identifies the divine with
the timeless or invariant factor in the theoretic component.”
“This explains why the Far Eastern religions do not need a religious
prophet if the divine is to be revealed to man, and why the Western
religions must have one. If the divine is given with immediacy then it is
here in the world of immediate intuition already without the mediation of a
divinely inspired representative. Thus all that religious sages in the
Orient have to do is to direct one's attention to the factor given with
immediacy with which the divine is identified. If, however, the divine is
identified with an unseen factor in the nature of things, then obviously the
only way in which man can know God with the immediacy of the aesthetic
intuition is by a divinely inspired being representing God coming into the
world of immediacy. Hence the religious prophet without whom man in the
theistic religions cannot be saved, becomes essential...”
At some point, you might like to read the rest of the chapter that the above
section is derived from as this is where Northrop suggests how East Asian
and Western religions can be integrated. I’m not saying that I think such a
project can succeed but it might give you food for thought.
Finally, another seeming contradiction in your post to Ian also appears in
two paragraphs were you state in the first that:
“Level 4 I see as necessarily wordless… I think that many languages (e.g.
science and mathematics) are level 3 phenomena organised by level 4
understandings. Language cannot encapsulate level 4, for this reason. Hence,
'the finger pointing at the moon'.”
While the second paragraph states:
“I see level 4 as being fundamentally oriented from the virtues; the virtues
being those static patterns which enable resistance to social pressures
(honesty and integrity etc - what the Sophists were teaching, originally). I
see the various intellectual patterns like SOM, mathematics, Aristotelian
logic - but also theatre, art, film, poetry (especially poetry) - as being
the fruits of those virtues. Those virtues I think are the sinews of the
soul; the soul being simply a level 4 pattern, more or less open to Quality
(= salvation?).”
It seems strange or even incorrect to describe mathematical symbols and
logic as being primarily social phenomena. It also seems incorrect to
think of a piece of art or a poem as being “dishonest” or lacking
“integrity”. How are we to distinguish, for instance, between a dishonest
and an honest Van Gogh? In other words, you seem to be confusing matters
(by conflating various social, intellectual and aesthetic elements into one
level) rather than clarifying them though I do realise that yours is a
working project rather than a finalised metaphysics.
Best wishes,
Anthony
www.robertpirsig.org
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