Merton has analyzed for us with deep insight, what ails man, especially the modern man. He starts from a Christian point of view. Other views are possible too. One such is offered by Erich Fromm in his classic, which bears a rather counter-intuitive title: "The Fear of Freedom" (FOF), first published in 1942. Many of the insights he offered there seem as relevant to today's society as they were more than three score years ago.
Jean Jacques Rosseau, a nervous Swiss, has given us such quotable quotes as "Childhood is the sleep of reason, " "Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it." , Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.", "Force does not constitute right... obedience is due only to legitimate powers.", "Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.", "It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.", "It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a
majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a
minority can" is considered one of the intellectual precursors of French Revolution. But to him, we owe probably his most famous description of the condition of man, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains". Indeed, we are all slaves, in one way or another. Some of the restrictions upon our freedom are imposed upon us externally by Nature, eg. the laws of physics, the climate, natural disasters, our genes, our biology, our physiology etc; some of the restraints upon our liberty are imposed on us by society e.g its customs, mores and values but often, we are our own worst enemy: we imprison ourselves, psychologically.
To Fromm, modern European and American history is focused around the effort to gain freedom from the political, economic and spiritual shackles that have bound men. When fighting for its own liberation from domination, the French bourgeoisie believed itself fighting for human freedom as such and was thus able to appeal to a universal longing for freedom from all the oppressed classes but once they managed to seize power, they sided with the enemies of freedom to defend their own new privilege. This happened not only in in France but also in England, in Germany and in "Communist" Russia where the "socialists" were supposed to be representing the interest of the working class and the landless peasants. In the West, "the principles of economic liberalism, political democracy, religious autonomy and individualism in personal life, gave expression to the longing for freedom...Man had overcome the domination of nature and made himself her master; he had overthrown the domination of the Church and the domination of the absolutist state. The abolition of external domination seemed not only a necessary but a also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom of the individual." (FOF 1-2). But the example of Nazi Germany had shown that "millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought ways of escaping from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defence of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for."(FOF 2) To John Dewey, it is the existence of conditions within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions which have given victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. To him, the battlefield is thus also here--"within ourselves and our institutions." Fromm too, asks a series of probing questions : Why is there a longing for submission and a lust for power? Is the desire for freedom inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience across cultures or does it differ according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure? Is it also the presence of something else and if so, what? What are the socio-economic factors in society that make for the striving of freedom? Can freedom become a burden too heavy for man to bear but something he tries to escape? If so, why is freedom perceived as a threat? by some and a cherished goal by others? Is there not besides an innate desire for freedom, also an instinctive wish for submission. If sot, how explain submission to political and other types of leaders? Is there not just submission to external authority but also submission to internalized authorities, e.g. duty or conscience, to inner compulsions or to any anonymous authorities like public opinion? Is there a hidden satisfaction in submitting and if so, what is its essence? What creates man's an insatiable lust for power? Is it the strength of their vital energy or is it a fundamental weakness and inability to experience life spontaneously and lovingly? What are the psychological conditions that make for the strength of these strivings? What are the social conditions upon which such psychological conditions in turn are based? What is the attraction of Fascism to certain sectors of society? In his book he tries to analyze the dynamic factors in the character structure of the modern man which made him want to give up freedom in Fascist countries and which also prevail in millions of American.
Prior to the 19th Century, man was though of as primarily a rational animal whose action were determined by self-interest and his ability to act in according with it and Hobbes, who recognizes that there there is in a man a drive for power and an innate capacity for hostility, explains such forces in terms of rational self-interest: everyone wants happiness but there are not enough resources to satisfy everyone to the same extent, they got to fight with each other and they want power only in so far as it may serve to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present. "The dark and diabolical forces of man's nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history" and were explained by "lack of knowledge" or by "cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests." and former periods were looked upon as extinct volcanoes which have ceased to pose any serious menace and economic crises were thought of as mere periodic accidents. Only a few people were aware of the rumbling of the volcanoes: Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. And Freud in particular was able to point to, more than most, the existence of irrational but unconscious forces, hitherto ignored or neglected by modern rationalism, which determine human behavior: he taught us the meaning of dreams and certain telling symptoms of subterranean forces of irrationality operating in everyday life and provided us with framework for analyzing a person's character structure and showed us how whole character structures were reactions to certain influences from the outside world in early childhood.
(To be cont'd)
2011年8月7日 星期日
2011年8月6日 星期六
Some Afterlife Fun
Last night, I attended a talk on "The philosophy of afterlife" at the HKSHP. It was quite good, but not as good as I expected. As I was casting about in my mind what kind of jokes to post this weekend, naturally the word "afterlife" popped up. Why not? So here are a number of them.
1.
A butler came running into his important
master's
office.
"Sir, sir, there's a ghost in the corridor. What
shall I do with
him?"
Without looking up from his work the master
said, "Tell him I
can't see him."
2.
Three
men died and were taken by God to the top of a cliff.
God said to
them that since they had been such great outstanding citizens of
Earth that they would be given one chance to become anything that
they desired.
The
first man ran to the edge of the cliff, jumped into the air and
shouted, "I want to be an eagle." Instantly he was changed into an
eagle and soared off into the sunset.
The
second man ran to the edge of the cliff, jumped into the air and
shouted, "I want to be an owl." Instantly he was changed into an owl
and soared off into the sunset.
The
third man ran towards the edge of the cliff, tripped on a rock, and
shouted, "Oh shit ..."
3.
A bad guy dies and is greeted by Saint Peter.
St. Peter tells
the man he must choose between three hells.
The first hell is very hot and he sees a lot of
people burning in fire.
The next hell is freezing cold and he sees
people shivering and clamoring.
In the third hell, he sees people
standing in shit up to their waist but they look quite happy. They are drinking a cup of coffee and are chatting with each other.
So
the guy says to St. Peter, "I prefer the third hell."
Whoosh, he's there.
He gets a cup of coffee and feels quite comfortable.
Suddenly he
hears a beep from a loud speaker that says, "Attention. Attention.
Attention. The Coffee break is over. Time now to stand on your head."
4.
Three men died.
Before God would let them into heaven,
God gave them a chance to come back as anything they wanted.
1.
A butler came running into his important
master's
office.
"Sir, sir, there's a ghost in the corridor. What
shall I do with
him?"
Without looking up from his work the master
said, "Tell him I
can't see him."
2.
Three
men died and were taken by God to the top of a cliff.
God said to
them that since they had been such great outstanding citizens of
Earth that they would be given one chance to become anything that
they desired.
The
first man ran to the edge of the cliff, jumped into the air and
shouted, "I want to be an eagle." Instantly he was changed into an
eagle and soared off into the sunset.
The
second man ran to the edge of the cliff, jumped into the air and
shouted, "I want to be an owl." Instantly he was changed into an owl
and soared off into the sunset.
The
third man ran towards the edge of the cliff, tripped on a rock, and
shouted, "Oh shit ..."
3.
A bad guy dies and is greeted by Saint Peter.
St. Peter tells
the man he must choose between three hells.
The first hell is very hot and he sees a lot of
people burning in fire.
The next hell is freezing cold and he sees
people shivering and clamoring.
In the third hell, he sees people
standing in shit up to their waist but they look quite happy. They are drinking a cup of coffee and are chatting with each other.
So
the guy says to St. Peter, "I prefer the third hell."
Whoosh, he's there.
He gets a cup of coffee and feels quite comfortable.
Suddenly he
hears a beep from a loud speaker that says, "Attention. Attention.
Attention. The Coffee break is over. Time now to stand on your head."
4.
Three men died.
Before God would let them into heaven,
God gave them a chance to come back as anything they wanted.
The
first guy said, "I want to come back as myself, but 100 times
smarter."
So God
made him 100 times smarter.
The
second guy said, "I want to be better than that guy. Make me 1000
times smarter."
His wish was granted. He was 1000 times smarter.
The
last guy decided he would be the best. So he said, "God, make me
better than both of them. Make me 1,000,000 times smarter."
So God
turned him into a woman.
Have a nice weekend.
2011年8月4日 星期四
An American Movie that Aspires to be an Epic
Heard a lot about a movie called "The Tree of Life", the enigmatic and reclusive Terrence Malick's fifth film in nearly 4 decades ("Badlands" [1973], "Days of Heaven" [1978], "The Thin Red Line" [1998], and "The New World" [2005]), . Saw it yesterday. It was a happy but mixed experience.
A "Tree of Life" is concept in various mythologies and religions the chief idea of which is that all forms of knowledge and of life are somehow connected: male and female, life and death, love and hate, success and failure, strength and weakness, good and evil, man and Nature (trees, grass, animals, birds and fishes, the sun, the moon and the stars, earth and sky, the universe, fire and water, mountains, deserts, beaches etc.). Everything unfolds according to their own rhythm, causing joys and sorrows, magnificently, mercilessly, relentlessly and mysteriously, indifferent to man's will and desires. It's also connected to concepts of fertility and immortality.
As the film opens, we see O'Brien, (Brad Pitt) trying to talk to his wife Mrs O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) amidst the loud roaring of an airplane engine at an airport. Jessica says she doesn't want to live. We are shown a guitar leaning disconsolately against a foldable chair on the wooden floor of the porch facing the green grass of the backyard, through a glass door. The guitar belongs to Steve, their 19-year-old second son. We hear a Biblical quotation from the Book of Job: God asks, "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation ... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" We see O'Brien talking to Jack (Sean Penn), his middle-aged eldest son suffering from a mid-life crisis, having divorced and remarried and having some unresolved issues: we hear in one of his voice-over monologues "Father, Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will."(probably conflicts between reason and feeling, between clarity and ambiguity, between limit and the dissolution of limit, between the head and the heart, between self-love and selfless-love). Jack told his father that there was never a day he did not remember Steve. Then we are shown Jack's eyes landing on the planting of a tree in a new architectural project. This triggers his memories of his childhood (the young Jack being played superbly by Hunter McCrackern). Then the scene cuts to the origin of the universe, with its endless volcanic eruptions, formation of the sea and first cells and finally, the emergence of dinosaurs, one of which was shown giving a "light" dinosaur tap on an injured cub with a gash at its side lying helplessly upon a beach and then moving away..
Steve is probably O'Brien's favourite son, perhaps, as we learn later, like him, he had a passion for music and dared follow his dream, unlike O'Brien himself, who wanted to become a professional organic player but ended up being an engineer with 26 patents under his name which he attempted to sell and doing marketing job for his company in the 1950s' mid-America. He advised young Jack in one of their father(not dad)-to-son ( he objects to being called "dad) talks never to follow in his footsteps and never to make the same mistake of getting "sidetracked".
The story is about how O'Brien brought three lives into the world, all boys, how he taught them to know what is theirs and not theirs, how to draw boundaries between self and others and how to fight and be strong, how to hone their skill so that they may survive in a tough world and how his teaching had a permanent effect on Jack's life. . The story is told through magnificently filmed sequences portraying planets, fire, huge sea waves, desert caverns, water and wind eroded mesa and natural sandstone sculptures in the grand canyons country, microscopic images of tissues and cells, lush green grass on land and giant underwater fresh water weeds, huge salt desert and clear blue skies. As voice overs while we watch the stunning photographic work, we hear the questions the three protagonists ( the father, the mother and the first born, now head of a huge architectural design company in some towering steel and glass structure), ask of God: why he should do what he did.
We are shown in rough chronological order each stage of the development of the three children up to about time of death of O'Brien's second son Steve: how O'Brien taught them, largely in the form of lectures or commands on the dinner table or out in their family yard, how to water and weed grass, how to plant trees, how to fight and defend themselves in the typical 1950's mid-American paternalistic, stern, authoritarian and disciplinarian style where a man is king within his own castle and how although he would work hard, give security, protection to his family and when he got a moment to spare, some education on the "facts of life" to his children but will turn to violence if he status as head of family is challenged in the slightest way. But we are also shown how the relationship between sons and father is one of fear and respect, more like the top-down power relationship between a teacher and master to his pupil and apprentice and in which he somehow felt compelled to demonstrate his "love" only through action, never in tender or comforting words because probably he thought it "unmanly" to project any any image of himself to his children except one of "strength" and "toughness" as befitting a "master of the family". We are shown how once he is gone on a business trip, the children could finally breathed a sigh of relief and literally jump for joy in their beds, holding their pillows for comfort because only then would they finally be able to do what pleased them most, viz. to relax and to have childish fun in all sorts of silly ways, with the mother joining in the chase for undiluted and non-didactic joy. Jack recalls that that when he felt the need to be rebellious and wished that his father was dead and proceeded to experience his urge towards violence by throwing the first stone at the glass panes of a deserted house whereupon the other teenage boys around him followed suit and when he began to watch the underwear of a female neighbor. He was always a leader. He was taught that way.
What I like about this long awaited film is that it shows, not tell what Malick intends to say: in lush imagery, often to the sound of awe-inspiring religious or other uplifting classical music. He supplies little connectives. We got to piece the narrative together. He just leaves clues in the conversations between the characters, their physical appearance and clothes to enable us to locate the time, place and context of the various episodes in the "epic" reminiscence of their growing up and "maturity"(?). I like the tiny but telling details that Malick chose to illustrate the relationship between the characters. Thus we rarely see Pitt smile, except with great constraint, to his wife and children and we would always see him grabbing the scruff of the neck of his elder son whenever he talked to him and taught him the ways of the world. At the dinner table, he would merely stare straight into the eyes of the children in silence, like a head lion surveying his pubs, and the children would have to scan his face for the slightest sign of disapproval before daring to gingerly remove a coveted piece of meat or cake from the common plate on the dinner table to their own dish. Likewise, he shows us how Steve trusted his eldest brother Jack, despite their father's warning against trusting any one too much, by putting his hand right in front of the tip of the barrel of an air gun they were then playing upon Jack's suggestion and then running away in pain when Jack actually pulled the trigger and how later, Jack handed Steve a thick rectangular wooden pole and asked Steve to hit him back if he like so as to even out the score for having betrayed him earlier and how Steve took the pole, made as if he would do so and then smiled and threw it away without getting even. I also like the scene which O'Brien got up from the dinner table when Steve looked up to his father and said "silence", the word he must have heard hundreds of time at the dinner table, when O'Brien was making a noise when he was eating, as he was taught, and O'Brien got angry, pushed everything aside to thrash him and then returned to the table to continue eating his dinner in anger as if nothing had happened but how her wife expressed her disapproval at his boorish way by deliberately throwing the dish washing towel with more force than was really necessary and noisily washing the dishes and how all O'Brien knew was to resort to his sheer muscular power to hug her close to his own chest against her wishes and not allow her writhing hand to escape from his hold!
What impressed me most in this film is Malick' s use visual symbolism. The creative force of life is always associated with light and with fire, whether it be the flickering flame of a candle or the superhot flow of glowing volcanic lava in gold and red and with the male principle. The capacity for spontaneous enjoyment of sensory pleasure and the empathetic nurturing influence of the female principle is however, always associated with water, whether it be the clear water of a pond, a river full of weeds, the gush of water rushing out from the jet of the garden hose which Jessica appear to thoroughly enjoy when she allowed sole of her feet to be tickled by it, or the swimming pool where all the children were having fun but where however a fatal drowning of another child occurred, despite all efforts to revive him by O'Brien. The film ends, with O'Brien's plant being closed and he and his family had to relocate and he finally reconciles with his family: we are shown, surrealistically, images of various people walking slowly, serenely, relaxedly along a beach where the water has receded, revealing the wet sand beneath and offering each other gentle hugs bathed in the soft fading light of a sunset. The beach is where the sea meets the sky on the far horizon and the soft sand on the beach. Whilst the sea an whip up huge billows whose combined weight and power is not to be underestimated and whilst it can lash, swallow and kill, it can also comfort, surround and soothe. The beach at low tide is visual embodiment of the latter. That is cinema! It is cinema as poetry, epic and lyrical by turns. But that is not the only surrealistic episode, we also see Jack walking through a make shift wooden gate erected in the middle of nowhere in the arid mesa land of strange sand and wind-carved sculpture ( the desert of his emotional life?) and Mrs. O"Brien walking over a white lake of dessicated salt towards the light. As all symbols, they are ultimately ambiguous, enigmatic and open ended. I also like the imagery of a field full of sun-flowers. Perhaps we all need the sun to continue to flower. The film closes as it began with the flickering yellow-red flame.
It is debatable whether the trivialities of mid-American domestic life in the mid-1950s are capable of supporting the kind of cosmic or epic story that Malick seems to working towards with the stunningly spectacular photography of Emmanuel Lubezski and the voice-overs quotations from the Bible and interrogation of God by his three main protagonists: O'Brien, his wife and their eldest son Jack. The ambition is commendable but in the final analysis, I don't think it works because it lacks sufficient emphasis upon the sense of history and a certain "heroic" proportions to the acts of the protagonists, which is what an epic requires. It seems a free-floating story without adequate comparisons and contrasts with other characters of the same historical era who share a common fate or by contrast, a different fate. The "larger than life" heroism and the sense of history is simply not there. Malick may want to tackle such big questions as the origin and the meaning of life, the meaning of death and the nature of God's grace but I don't think that he is there. It was a good try though. There are some very moving scenes, great music and first class photography, very lyrical and even"epic" but only visually and perhaps musically. However, as a totality, the film simply does not have a successful "epic" structure. Whatever the truth may be, it won the 2011 Palm d'Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
A "Tree of Life" is concept in various mythologies and religions the chief idea of which is that all forms of knowledge and of life are somehow connected: male and female, life and death, love and hate, success and failure, strength and weakness, good and evil, man and Nature (trees, grass, animals, birds and fishes, the sun, the moon and the stars, earth and sky, the universe, fire and water, mountains, deserts, beaches etc.). Everything unfolds according to their own rhythm, causing joys and sorrows, magnificently, mercilessly, relentlessly and mysteriously, indifferent to man's will and desires. It's also connected to concepts of fertility and immortality.
As the film opens, we see O'Brien, (Brad Pitt) trying to talk to his wife Mrs O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) amidst the loud roaring of an airplane engine at an airport. Jessica says she doesn't want to live. We are shown a guitar leaning disconsolately against a foldable chair on the wooden floor of the porch facing the green grass of the backyard, through a glass door. The guitar belongs to Steve, their 19-year-old second son. We hear a Biblical quotation from the Book of Job: God asks, "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation ... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" We see O'Brien talking to Jack (Sean Penn), his middle-aged eldest son suffering from a mid-life crisis, having divorced and remarried and having some unresolved issues: we hear in one of his voice-over monologues "Father, Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will."(probably conflicts between reason and feeling, between clarity and ambiguity, between limit and the dissolution of limit, between the head and the heart, between self-love and selfless-love). Jack told his father that there was never a day he did not remember Steve. Then we are shown Jack's eyes landing on the planting of a tree in a new architectural project. This triggers his memories of his childhood (the young Jack being played superbly by Hunter McCrackern). Then the scene cuts to the origin of the universe, with its endless volcanic eruptions, formation of the sea and first cells and finally, the emergence of dinosaurs, one of which was shown giving a "light" dinosaur tap on an injured cub with a gash at its side lying helplessly upon a beach and then moving away..
Steve is probably O'Brien's favourite son, perhaps, as we learn later, like him, he had a passion for music and dared follow his dream, unlike O'Brien himself, who wanted to become a professional organic player but ended up being an engineer with 26 patents under his name which he attempted to sell and doing marketing job for his company in the 1950s' mid-America. He advised young Jack in one of their father(not dad)-to-son ( he objects to being called "dad) talks never to follow in his footsteps and never to make the same mistake of getting "sidetracked".
The story is about how O'Brien brought three lives into the world, all boys, how he taught them to know what is theirs and not theirs, how to draw boundaries between self and others and how to fight and be strong, how to hone their skill so that they may survive in a tough world and how his teaching had a permanent effect on Jack's life. . The story is told through magnificently filmed sequences portraying planets, fire, huge sea waves, desert caverns, water and wind eroded mesa and natural sandstone sculptures in the grand canyons country, microscopic images of tissues and cells, lush green grass on land and giant underwater fresh water weeds, huge salt desert and clear blue skies. As voice overs while we watch the stunning photographic work, we hear the questions the three protagonists ( the father, the mother and the first born, now head of a huge architectural design company in some towering steel and glass structure), ask of God: why he should do what he did.
We are shown in rough chronological order each stage of the development of the three children up to about time of death of O'Brien's second son Steve: how O'Brien taught them, largely in the form of lectures or commands on the dinner table or out in their family yard, how to water and weed grass, how to plant trees, how to fight and defend themselves in the typical 1950's mid-American paternalistic, stern, authoritarian and disciplinarian style where a man is king within his own castle and how although he would work hard, give security, protection to his family and when he got a moment to spare, some education on the "facts of life" to his children but will turn to violence if he status as head of family is challenged in the slightest way. But we are also shown how the relationship between sons and father is one of fear and respect, more like the top-down power relationship between a teacher and master to his pupil and apprentice and in which he somehow felt compelled to demonstrate his "love" only through action, never in tender or comforting words because probably he thought it "unmanly" to project any any image of himself to his children except one of "strength" and "toughness" as befitting a "master of the family". We are shown how once he is gone on a business trip, the children could finally breathed a sigh of relief and literally jump for joy in their beds, holding their pillows for comfort because only then would they finally be able to do what pleased them most, viz. to relax and to have childish fun in all sorts of silly ways, with the mother joining in the chase for undiluted and non-didactic joy. Jack recalls that that when he felt the need to be rebellious and wished that his father was dead and proceeded to experience his urge towards violence by throwing the first stone at the glass panes of a deserted house whereupon the other teenage boys around him followed suit and when he began to watch the underwear of a female neighbor. He was always a leader. He was taught that way.
What I like about this long awaited film is that it shows, not tell what Malick intends to say: in lush imagery, often to the sound of awe-inspiring religious or other uplifting classical music. He supplies little connectives. We got to piece the narrative together. He just leaves clues in the conversations between the characters, their physical appearance and clothes to enable us to locate the time, place and context of the various episodes in the "epic" reminiscence of their growing up and "maturity"(?). I like the tiny but telling details that Malick chose to illustrate the relationship between the characters. Thus we rarely see Pitt smile, except with great constraint, to his wife and children and we would always see him grabbing the scruff of the neck of his elder son whenever he talked to him and taught him the ways of the world. At the dinner table, he would merely stare straight into the eyes of the children in silence, like a head lion surveying his pubs, and the children would have to scan his face for the slightest sign of disapproval before daring to gingerly remove a coveted piece of meat or cake from the common plate on the dinner table to their own dish. Likewise, he shows us how Steve trusted his eldest brother Jack, despite their father's warning against trusting any one too much, by putting his hand right in front of the tip of the barrel of an air gun they were then playing upon Jack's suggestion and then running away in pain when Jack actually pulled the trigger and how later, Jack handed Steve a thick rectangular wooden pole and asked Steve to hit him back if he like so as to even out the score for having betrayed him earlier and how Steve took the pole, made as if he would do so and then smiled and threw it away without getting even. I also like the scene which O'Brien got up from the dinner table when Steve looked up to his father and said "silence", the word he must have heard hundreds of time at the dinner table, when O'Brien was making a noise when he was eating, as he was taught, and O'Brien got angry, pushed everything aside to thrash him and then returned to the table to continue eating his dinner in anger as if nothing had happened but how her wife expressed her disapproval at his boorish way by deliberately throwing the dish washing towel with more force than was really necessary and noisily washing the dishes and how all O'Brien knew was to resort to his sheer muscular power to hug her close to his own chest against her wishes and not allow her writhing hand to escape from his hold!
What impressed me most in this film is Malick' s use visual symbolism. The creative force of life is always associated with light and with fire, whether it be the flickering flame of a candle or the superhot flow of glowing volcanic lava in gold and red and with the male principle. The capacity for spontaneous enjoyment of sensory pleasure and the empathetic nurturing influence of the female principle is however, always associated with water, whether it be the clear water of a pond, a river full of weeds, the gush of water rushing out from the jet of the garden hose which Jessica appear to thoroughly enjoy when she allowed sole of her feet to be tickled by it, or the swimming pool where all the children were having fun but where however a fatal drowning of another child occurred, despite all efforts to revive him by O'Brien. The film ends, with O'Brien's plant being closed and he and his family had to relocate and he finally reconciles with his family: we are shown, surrealistically, images of various people walking slowly, serenely, relaxedly along a beach where the water has receded, revealing the wet sand beneath and offering each other gentle hugs bathed in the soft fading light of a sunset. The beach is where the sea meets the sky on the far horizon and the soft sand on the beach. Whilst the sea an whip up huge billows whose combined weight and power is not to be underestimated and whilst it can lash, swallow and kill, it can also comfort, surround and soothe. The beach at low tide is visual embodiment of the latter. That is cinema! It is cinema as poetry, epic and lyrical by turns. But that is not the only surrealistic episode, we also see Jack walking through a make shift wooden gate erected in the middle of nowhere in the arid mesa land of strange sand and wind-carved sculpture ( the desert of his emotional life?) and Mrs. O"Brien walking over a white lake of dessicated salt towards the light. As all symbols, they are ultimately ambiguous, enigmatic and open ended. I also like the imagery of a field full of sun-flowers. Perhaps we all need the sun to continue to flower. The film closes as it began with the flickering yellow-red flame.
It is debatable whether the trivialities of mid-American domestic life in the mid-1950s are capable of supporting the kind of cosmic or epic story that Malick seems to working towards with the stunningly spectacular photography of Emmanuel Lubezski and the voice-overs quotations from the Bible and interrogation of God by his three main protagonists: O'Brien, his wife and their eldest son Jack. The ambition is commendable but in the final analysis, I don't think it works because it lacks sufficient emphasis upon the sense of history and a certain "heroic" proportions to the acts of the protagonists, which is what an epic requires. It seems a free-floating story without adequate comparisons and contrasts with other characters of the same historical era who share a common fate or by contrast, a different fate. The "larger than life" heroism and the sense of history is simply not there. Malick may want to tackle such big questions as the origin and the meaning of life, the meaning of death and the nature of God's grace but I don't think that he is there. It was a good try though. There are some very moving scenes, great music and first class photography, very lyrical and even"epic" but only visually and perhaps musically. However, as a totality, the film simply does not have a successful "epic" structure. Whatever the truth may be, it won the 2011 Palm d'Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
2011年8月2日 星期二
Who Are You (IV)
(Cont'd)
To Merton, since the Fall, there is no cure to man's spiritual anguish but mysticism. He shares St. Augustine's view that man's Fall led to a double movement of introversion and extraversion: he first withdrew spiritually from God into his own soul, as if he could live in his spirit privately and alone , referring everything to himself instead of to God but then, unable to remain centered in himself, he fell beneath himself into the multiplicity and confusion of external things ( De Trinitate Bk. 12 cap 8-10).Adam lived as if there were no common good in the world and re-oriented his whole being upon his own private good which had to be restricted and entrenched first within itself and then defended against every rival and "the fort" within which he entrenched himself was his own body. "No longer spiritual, the body dominated his spirit.". Henceforth, he could only get access to reality through the openings in that fort: his five senses which can directly reach only material things. His spirit thus became subject to and dependent upon matter, which like everything else made by God, including his body and its passions, is essentially good. However "it is evil for the spirit to be completely subjected to matter, for reason to be swayed and dominated by passion and for the flesh to rule the whole man" because the flesh and the passions,by their nature, are always at the mercy of anarchic sensual stimulation as there are sensory stimulation at each and every moment.To Merton, a spirit that is immersed in matter which it cannot fully control is worse than a captain of a rudderless ship carried away by the waves of storm because the captain can at least see that the ship is in danger whereas our spirit, left to itself, "is only dimly aware that it has been the victim of a disaster. It feels to some extent at home in its own little universe--the body. It sets about its task of governing this universe with its own laws." Only gradually does it come to find out how little control it has and how much it is governed by the blind needs, compulsion and demands of passion. Psychoanalysis has made it abundantly clear how the tyranny that our unconscious instinctual passions and compulsions exercise over our fallen spirit.
Although dimly aware of the dangers, we rationalize and excuse the lusts and ambitions of our selfish and fleshy ego, camouflage our own defects but magnify the sins of the others, evade our countless fears, force ourselves to believe in our own lies and struggle in a thousand ways to silence that secret voice of anxiety. Through the sin of pride and concupiscence, we barter away the peace of innocent self-realization for the agony of a guilt-ridden awareness: "instead of being perfectly actualized in spirit, integrated and unified in the selfless ecstasy of a contemplation that goes out entirely to the 'other', man is literally 'dis-tracted'--pulled apart-- by an almost infinite number of awarenesses. He is conscious of everything trivial, remembers everything except what is necessary, feels everything that she should not feel, yields to demands that he should never even hear, looks everywhere, pays attention to every creaking board and rattling shutter in his haunted house.". It is useless to exorcise the accusing silence by turning his haunted house into a dens of thieves because "no amount of business prosperity and luxury can hide the abomination of desolation within us."
After withdrawing from God, man has to mentally reconstruct his entire universe in his own image and likeness: he was forced to turn to natural science, "the mental toil that pieces together fragments that never manage to coalesce in one completely integrated whole: the labor of action without contemplation, that never ends in peace or satisfaction, since no tasks is finished without opening the way to ten more tasks that have to be done." Merton quotes Ecclesiastes 2: 17, 18: "Therefore I loathed life, since for me the work that is done under the sun is evil: for all is vanity and a chase after wind. And I detested all the fruits of my labor under the sun." to describe what we secretly feel but try desperately to suppress. We try to bury our secret fears by ceaseless activity. Isn't that not a true description of our lives of constant hustle and bustle: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Merton says, "in fallen man, action is the desperate anodyne, assuaging the pain of a soul that instinctively knows that it was made for contemplation--a soul that knows that action, which is itself necessary, is only a means to an end."
The solution? To reverse Adam's journey and go back by the way we came through the center of our soul. Merton says, "We must withdraw ourselves (in the right Christian sense) from exterior things and pass through the center of our souls to find God...recover possession of our true selves by liberation from anxiety and fear and inordinate desire. And when we have gained possession of our souls, we must to "go out" of ourselves to God and to others by supernatural charity." But we can't do that without first taking stock of our situation and realize who we really are: "we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger. We must constantly question his motives and penetrate his disguises." With this emphasis on self-awareness, Merton sounds almost like a Buddhist now. It is most important to contemplate and reflect in silence because otherwise, "our attempts at self-knowledge are bound to fail, or if we fully and complacently acquiesce in our own illusion of who we are, our 'self-knowledge' will only strive to reinforce our identification of ourselves with this impostor," says Merton. To him, it is a "spiritual disaster" for a man to rest content with his exterior identity or his social self or in his words, his "passport picture of himself". He asks; "Does he really exist because his name has been inscribed in Who's Who? Is his name in the Sunday paper any safe indication that he is not a zombie?" If so, "he is only pushing the responsibility of his existence on to society": "instead of facing the question of who he is, he assumes he is a person because there appear to be other persons who recognize him when he walks down the street."
To Merton, we find our true self only in that image of God within our own soul, which is made in the image of God. That image can be known by rational inference. However, according to Merton, "that is not enough to give us a real experience of our own identity. It is hardly any better than inferring that we exist because other people act as if we existed.". He thinks that just as some people have to struggle to recover a natural spontaneous realization of their own capacity for life and movement and physical enjoyment, so all men have to struggle to regain the spontaneous and vital awareness of their spirituality, of the fact that we have a soul that is capable of coming to life and experiencing profound and hidden values which the flesh and its senses can never discover alone. And this spirituality in man is identified with the divine image of our soul". Thus for Merton, our authentic "self" is that image of ourselves as a creature made in the likeness of God! However, that image is not just a static "representation" of something in the divine essence. It is " a dynamic tendency that carries us towards union with God: as he says, "a kind of gravitational sensitivity to the things of God" or as St. Thomas has said, "The image of God is seen in the soul in so far as the soul is carried, or is able to be carried, towards God." (Summa Theologica I Q 93 a8). To Merton, it is not sufficient for us to merely realize that the spirituality of our nature makes us potentially god-like. We must actualize that potentiality through knowledge and love or "more precisely, by a knowledge of God that is inseparable from an experience of love or as St. Thomas says, "The image of God is in the soul according to the knowledge it conceives of God and according to the love that flows from that knowledge." In other words, we must realize our image of ourselves as a creature of God by loving others. Merton explains: "Self-realization in this true religious sense is then less an awareness of ourselves than an awareness of the God to whom we are drawn in the depths of our own being. We become real, and experience our actuality, not when we pause to reflect upon our own self as an isolated individual entity, but rather when, transcending ourselves and passing beyond reflection. we center our whole soul upon God Who is our Life. That is to say, we fully "realize" ourselves when we cease to be conscious of ourselves in separateness and know nothing but the one God Who is above all knowledge." This is what Jesus meant when he says, "he that would save his life would lose it." (Lk 9:24). We realize ourselves only when we identify ourselves and lose ourselves( in thought, words and deeds) in that image of God which is within our soul, whenever we lose ourselves in "a total consciousness of Him Who is Holy."
Merton offers us some advice on how we may realize our true self: "fidelity and attentiveness to the words of God". "He that is of God hears the words of God." But "to be 'aware' of God is to enter into contact with One, Who, infinitely hidden and transcendent, cannot be known as He is in Himself unless He reveals Himself to us. But God speaks to us, in his Scriptures, and has given Himself to us in his son--our whole life of faith is a life of attentiveness, of 'listening' in order to receive the word of God into our hearts, Fides ex auditu. And we listen to God in Liturgy, in His Scriptures, in meditation, in every expression of His Will for us." To Merton, "it is this listening and obedience to the word of God that restores the Divine likeness in our souls, and brings us the truth that makes us free." When we do that, we become a new man in Christ. When we know God this way, God is no longer known as an "object" since he cannot be contained in a concept. It is a mystical knowing.The knowledge of God's image in our soul "mysteriously coincides with His knowledge of us" according to Merton: "we apprehend Him by the love which identifies itself, within us, with His love for us. What will be fully realized in the beatific vision is realized inchoactively in contemplation even in this present life." We realize that we are known and loved by God, that we are seen and called by God and that our destiny is to be carried towards Him. To him "The sense of being 'carried' and "drawn' by love into the infinite space of a sublime and unthinkable freedom is the expression of our spiritual union with the Father, in the Son, and by the Holy Ghost, which constitutes in us our true identity as sons of God". With this new awareness, our soul or spirit undergoes a conversion, a metanoia, which re-orients and changes our whole being, raising it to a new level. We shall find ourselves most truly human when we are raised to the level of the divine: we transcend ourselves, we see ourselves in a new light, by losing sight of ourselves and no longer see ourselves but God. But this work cannot be done by ourselves alone: it is a divine gift; it must be done by the work of God, by his grace. If it is rare, that may be because we often refuse to allow God to do that work on account of our fear, our blindness, our ignorance and our hatred of risk. Merton says that to make this leap out of ourselves, "we have to be willing to let go of everything that is our own--all our plans, all our hesitations, all our own judgments." But he continues, "that does not mean that we give u thinking and acting: but that we are ready for any change that God's action may make in our lives."
Merton does not think the return journey back to God is easy, even amongst or especially in the religious because "there are few who are able to renounce their own methods of self-support in the spiritual journey towards God....there is too little faith...For when a man comes close to God and begins to find out that the Lord is hidden in the clouds of an infinite and inexorable transcendency, he begins to be afraid of One Who is so completely Other." Another difficulty, according to Merton is that, "God will not reduce the distance between ourselves and Him by any compromise with our own weakness and imperfection. The mercy, which is a total giving of His love to us, is anything but compromise, since it demands, in return, the total gift of ourselves to Him and this gift of ourselves is obstructed, within ourselves, by our own self-alienation."
To overcome the difficulties of our return to God and to achieve the recovery of our true identity, Merton advises us that we must stop saying, like Adam after the fall when he heard the voice of God in the afternoon garden;" I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid." (Genesis 2: 10) . He urges us: "We must cast away the 'aprons of leaves' and the 'garments of skins' which the Fathers of the Church variously interpret as passions and attachments to earthly things, and fixation in our own rigid determination to be someone other than our true selves."
Whatever the word "self" or "identity" may mean to other people, to Merton, they can refer only to the image of God within our soul: that ideal "self" which we are capable of becoming and which consists in loving others and merging ourselves in the great love that is partially embodied in the concept of the Christian God and which curiously involves forgetting all about what we normally consider to be our "self"! The old Adam in us must die. Only then can we become a new man, our true "self", one which is at one with God. Paradoxically, we are most our "self" when that "self" has become "dead" and gone and become merged with all the other selves and with God, which is our final resting place, through the practice of the fullest love. As Merton says, it is not easy and quite rare, not because God does not love us, but more because we do not love God or Love enough or which amounts to the same thing, because we do not have sufficient faith in Love, the principle underlying and sustaining all Life. Whether or not one agrees with Merton's theology, one must agree with his diagnosis of the ills in the soul of the modern man: it's exclusively material concerns, its egoism, its blind and totally unrestrained pursuit of sensory stimulation and "economic development" and its ruthlessly silencing of any voice attempting to advocate any form of rational control, whether on the personal or collective level., of our desires.
To Merton, since the Fall, there is no cure to man's spiritual anguish but mysticism. He shares St. Augustine's view that man's Fall led to a double movement of introversion and extraversion: he first withdrew spiritually from God into his own soul, as if he could live in his spirit privately and alone , referring everything to himself instead of to God but then, unable to remain centered in himself, he fell beneath himself into the multiplicity and confusion of external things ( De Trinitate Bk. 12 cap 8-10).Adam lived as if there were no common good in the world and re-oriented his whole being upon his own private good which had to be restricted and entrenched first within itself and then defended against every rival and "the fort" within which he entrenched himself was his own body. "No longer spiritual, the body dominated his spirit.". Henceforth, he could only get access to reality through the openings in that fort: his five senses which can directly reach only material things. His spirit thus became subject to and dependent upon matter, which like everything else made by God, including his body and its passions, is essentially good. However "it is evil for the spirit to be completely subjected to matter, for reason to be swayed and dominated by passion and for the flesh to rule the whole man" because the flesh and the passions,by their nature, are always at the mercy of anarchic sensual stimulation as there are sensory stimulation at each and every moment.To Merton, a spirit that is immersed in matter which it cannot fully control is worse than a captain of a rudderless ship carried away by the waves of storm because the captain can at least see that the ship is in danger whereas our spirit, left to itself, "is only dimly aware that it has been the victim of a disaster. It feels to some extent at home in its own little universe--the body. It sets about its task of governing this universe with its own laws." Only gradually does it come to find out how little control it has and how much it is governed by the blind needs, compulsion and demands of passion. Psychoanalysis has made it abundantly clear how the tyranny that our unconscious instinctual passions and compulsions exercise over our fallen spirit.
Although dimly aware of the dangers, we rationalize and excuse the lusts and ambitions of our selfish and fleshy ego, camouflage our own defects but magnify the sins of the others, evade our countless fears, force ourselves to believe in our own lies and struggle in a thousand ways to silence that secret voice of anxiety. Through the sin of pride and concupiscence, we barter away the peace of innocent self-realization for the agony of a guilt-ridden awareness: "instead of being perfectly actualized in spirit, integrated and unified in the selfless ecstasy of a contemplation that goes out entirely to the 'other', man is literally 'dis-tracted'--pulled apart-- by an almost infinite number of awarenesses. He is conscious of everything trivial, remembers everything except what is necessary, feels everything that she should not feel, yields to demands that he should never even hear, looks everywhere, pays attention to every creaking board and rattling shutter in his haunted house.". It is useless to exorcise the accusing silence by turning his haunted house into a dens of thieves because "no amount of business prosperity and luxury can hide the abomination of desolation within us."
After withdrawing from God, man has to mentally reconstruct his entire universe in his own image and likeness: he was forced to turn to natural science, "the mental toil that pieces together fragments that never manage to coalesce in one completely integrated whole: the labor of action without contemplation, that never ends in peace or satisfaction, since no tasks is finished without opening the way to ten more tasks that have to be done." Merton quotes Ecclesiastes 2: 17, 18: "Therefore I loathed life, since for me the work that is done under the sun is evil: for all is vanity and a chase after wind. And I detested all the fruits of my labor under the sun." to describe what we secretly feel but try desperately to suppress. We try to bury our secret fears by ceaseless activity. Isn't that not a true description of our lives of constant hustle and bustle: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Merton says, "in fallen man, action is the desperate anodyne, assuaging the pain of a soul that instinctively knows that it was made for contemplation--a soul that knows that action, which is itself necessary, is only a means to an end."
The solution? To reverse Adam's journey and go back by the way we came through the center of our soul. Merton says, "We must withdraw ourselves (in the right Christian sense) from exterior things and pass through the center of our souls to find God...recover possession of our true selves by liberation from anxiety and fear and inordinate desire. And when we have gained possession of our souls, we must to "go out" of ourselves to God and to others by supernatural charity." But we can't do that without first taking stock of our situation and realize who we really are: "we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger. We must constantly question his motives and penetrate his disguises." With this emphasis on self-awareness, Merton sounds almost like a Buddhist now. It is most important to contemplate and reflect in silence because otherwise, "our attempts at self-knowledge are bound to fail, or if we fully and complacently acquiesce in our own illusion of who we are, our 'self-knowledge' will only strive to reinforce our identification of ourselves with this impostor," says Merton. To him, it is a "spiritual disaster" for a man to rest content with his exterior identity or his social self or in his words, his "passport picture of himself". He asks; "Does he really exist because his name has been inscribed in Who's Who? Is his name in the Sunday paper any safe indication that he is not a zombie?" If so, "he is only pushing the responsibility of his existence on to society": "instead of facing the question of who he is, he assumes he is a person because there appear to be other persons who recognize him when he walks down the street."
To Merton, we find our true self only in that image of God within our own soul, which is made in the image of God. That image can be known by rational inference. However, according to Merton, "that is not enough to give us a real experience of our own identity. It is hardly any better than inferring that we exist because other people act as if we existed.". He thinks that just as some people have to struggle to recover a natural spontaneous realization of their own capacity for life and movement and physical enjoyment, so all men have to struggle to regain the spontaneous and vital awareness of their spirituality, of the fact that we have a soul that is capable of coming to life and experiencing profound and hidden values which the flesh and its senses can never discover alone. And this spirituality in man is identified with the divine image of our soul". Thus for Merton, our authentic "self" is that image of ourselves as a creature made in the likeness of God! However, that image is not just a static "representation" of something in the divine essence. It is " a dynamic tendency that carries us towards union with God: as he says, "a kind of gravitational sensitivity to the things of God" or as St. Thomas has said, "The image of God is seen in the soul in so far as the soul is carried, or is able to be carried, towards God." (Summa Theologica I Q 93 a8). To Merton, it is not sufficient for us to merely realize that the spirituality of our nature makes us potentially god-like. We must actualize that potentiality through knowledge and love or "more precisely, by a knowledge of God that is inseparable from an experience of love or as St. Thomas says, "The image of God is in the soul according to the knowledge it conceives of God and according to the love that flows from that knowledge." In other words, we must realize our image of ourselves as a creature of God by loving others. Merton explains: "Self-realization in this true religious sense is then less an awareness of ourselves than an awareness of the God to whom we are drawn in the depths of our own being. We become real, and experience our actuality, not when we pause to reflect upon our own self as an isolated individual entity, but rather when, transcending ourselves and passing beyond reflection. we center our whole soul upon God Who is our Life. That is to say, we fully "realize" ourselves when we cease to be conscious of ourselves in separateness and know nothing but the one God Who is above all knowledge." This is what Jesus meant when he says, "he that would save his life would lose it." (Lk 9:24). We realize ourselves only when we identify ourselves and lose ourselves( in thought, words and deeds) in that image of God which is within our soul, whenever we lose ourselves in "a total consciousness of Him Who is Holy."
Merton offers us some advice on how we may realize our true self: "fidelity and attentiveness to the words of God". "He that is of God hears the words of God." But "to be 'aware' of God is to enter into contact with One, Who, infinitely hidden and transcendent, cannot be known as He is in Himself unless He reveals Himself to us. But God speaks to us, in his Scriptures, and has given Himself to us in his son--our whole life of faith is a life of attentiveness, of 'listening' in order to receive the word of God into our hearts, Fides ex auditu. And we listen to God in Liturgy, in His Scriptures, in meditation, in every expression of His Will for us." To Merton, "it is this listening and obedience to the word of God that restores the Divine likeness in our souls, and brings us the truth that makes us free." When we do that, we become a new man in Christ. When we know God this way, God is no longer known as an "object" since he cannot be contained in a concept. It is a mystical knowing.The knowledge of God's image in our soul "mysteriously coincides with His knowledge of us" according to Merton: "we apprehend Him by the love which identifies itself, within us, with His love for us. What will be fully realized in the beatific vision is realized inchoactively in contemplation even in this present life." We realize that we are known and loved by God, that we are seen and called by God and that our destiny is to be carried towards Him. To him "The sense of being 'carried' and "drawn' by love into the infinite space of a sublime and unthinkable freedom is the expression of our spiritual union with the Father, in the Son, and by the Holy Ghost, which constitutes in us our true identity as sons of God". With this new awareness, our soul or spirit undergoes a conversion, a metanoia, which re-orients and changes our whole being, raising it to a new level. We shall find ourselves most truly human when we are raised to the level of the divine: we transcend ourselves, we see ourselves in a new light, by losing sight of ourselves and no longer see ourselves but God. But this work cannot be done by ourselves alone: it is a divine gift; it must be done by the work of God, by his grace. If it is rare, that may be because we often refuse to allow God to do that work on account of our fear, our blindness, our ignorance and our hatred of risk. Merton says that to make this leap out of ourselves, "we have to be willing to let go of everything that is our own--all our plans, all our hesitations, all our own judgments." But he continues, "that does not mean that we give u thinking and acting: but that we are ready for any change that God's action may make in our lives."
Merton does not think the return journey back to God is easy, even amongst or especially in the religious because "there are few who are able to renounce their own methods of self-support in the spiritual journey towards God....there is too little faith...For when a man comes close to God and begins to find out that the Lord is hidden in the clouds of an infinite and inexorable transcendency, he begins to be afraid of One Who is so completely Other." Another difficulty, according to Merton is that, "God will not reduce the distance between ourselves and Him by any compromise with our own weakness and imperfection. The mercy, which is a total giving of His love to us, is anything but compromise, since it demands, in return, the total gift of ourselves to Him and this gift of ourselves is obstructed, within ourselves, by our own self-alienation."
To overcome the difficulties of our return to God and to achieve the recovery of our true identity, Merton advises us that we must stop saying, like Adam after the fall when he heard the voice of God in the afternoon garden;" I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid." (Genesis 2: 10) . He urges us: "We must cast away the 'aprons of leaves' and the 'garments of skins' which the Fathers of the Church variously interpret as passions and attachments to earthly things, and fixation in our own rigid determination to be someone other than our true selves."
Whatever the word "self" or "identity" may mean to other people, to Merton, they can refer only to the image of God within our soul: that ideal "self" which we are capable of becoming and which consists in loving others and merging ourselves in the great love that is partially embodied in the concept of the Christian God and which curiously involves forgetting all about what we normally consider to be our "self"! The old Adam in us must die. Only then can we become a new man, our true "self", one which is at one with God. Paradoxically, we are most our "self" when that "self" has become "dead" and gone and become merged with all the other selves and with God, which is our final resting place, through the practice of the fullest love. As Merton says, it is not easy and quite rare, not because God does not love us, but more because we do not love God or Love enough or which amounts to the same thing, because we do not have sufficient faith in Love, the principle underlying and sustaining all Life. Whether or not one agrees with Merton's theology, one must agree with his diagnosis of the ills in the soul of the modern man: it's exclusively material concerns, its egoism, its blind and totally unrestrained pursuit of sensory stimulation and "economic development" and its ruthlessly silencing of any voice attempting to advocate any form of rational control, whether on the personal or collective level., of our desires.
2011年8月1日 星期一
Who Are You? (III)
We must do our best to try to find out why. Merton proposes that we follow a little the thoughts in Sermons 81 and 82 of St Bernard's Cantica in which he expressed the idea that "The act which was the source of all man's spiritual deordination was an act by which Adam cut himself off from God, from himself and from the reality around him....By an act of pure pride, untainted by the slightest sensuality, passion, weakness, fleshiness, or fear, Adam put an abyss between between himself and God and other men. He became a little universe enclosed within himself, communicating feebly, hesitantly and fearfully the other universes around him. The young worlds that came forth from him and Eve were wild, unpredictable and destructive worlds--beings like Cain that would have to be specially marked by God lest they be killed."
Merton asks,"What was this sin?" That sin was first of all, "an attitude of mind". Before he committed the act of eating the forbidden fruit, the attitude was already there" "a way of looking at reality that condemned man, by its very nature, to become unreal...Adam who possessed an existential, an experimental knowledge of all that was good and all that was real, and who was mystically united with God, the infinite source of all actual and possible reality, wanted to improve on this by knowing something else, which he thought, would be something more.": the knowledge of evil. He wanted "an experience, an existential knowledge of evil, "not only to know evil by theoretical inference from good (which he could well have done without sin) but he wanted to know evil in a way in which it was not even known by God: i.e. by experience". The result according to Merton is that in wishing for something more, he reached out for what in fact was "disastrously less": "in finding "two" he has less, not more, than the original 'one'. And he lost his inheritance, which was the free possession of all good, as a son of God. He tasted and saw that evil was terrible. And he hated himself for it." To me, Adam did what Faustus did: he wanted an intimate knowledge of good and evil. It was a sin of greed, of avarice, of immoderation, a false hope for more intellectual, metaphysical and existential knowledge than is good for him. He says, "I think something of a Prometheus exploit was secretly implicit in the outlook that led Adam to eat of the one bad tree in the garden...that he was induced to 'steal' the experience of evil by an act of disobedience clearly indicates, it seems to me, that he felt that all the good that had come to him could, if were lost, be stolen back." ie. he wanted to steal something which he knew in advance does not properly belongs to him.
What was the kind of "theft" involved? And why does he say it was a "theft"? Adam failed to understand "the true nature of love...that the gifts which had been given to him could only be possessed as long as they were received as gifts. They were not and never could be won by right of conquest for that was impossible. To think otherwise was, in fact, completely to misunderstand the true nature of God." To return to the Promethean analogy, Merton says, "thinking that the fire could be stolen, and not knowing that it would be freely given, he unavoidably knew only false gods, not the living God. These false gods were beings only a little more than strong than man, only a little more spiritual, only a little more wise. They needed fire, in the end, as much as man. They would resent the theft of fire. They would defend themselves jealously against any invasion of their Olympus. They did not want man to have what was theirs, for they could not afford to see themselves weakened and man strengthened. All these concepts imply a narrow, jealous, weak, fearful kind of god.
Merton thinks that in reaching out his hand for the forbidden fruit, Adam "implied that the taste of evil was something God also might possibly be wanting...perhaps, something God feared to let him have, lest man be made too strong and become his equal.( And yet Adam was already the equal of God in the fullest sense possible to mere man short of union with Him in the eternal beatific vision which was to be the reward of his probation)". To him, "such a thought was only possible in one who had already ceased to know the true God."
Whilst one may agree with Merton that Adam's sin may consist in his pride, but one may well question whether it could be said that Adam was the equal of God "in the fullest sense" before the ate the forbidden fruit. But there is little doubt that Adam wanted to know and taste what it felt like to be God. To me, this desire is quite natural. Man is born with an insatiable desire to find out that which is unknown to him. That has been the motive force behind all our discoveries in science and the driving force of our technology. Man has a natural curiosity. Some of us possess more of it than others. We prefer if possible not only to be, but to know why we are what we are, what is good and what is bad for us and for others. It is a mystery to me why God does not desire man to know the difference between good and evil. Perhaps such a knowledge may not always add to our happiness. But it certainly adds to our awareness as man. And what kind of life is one which is lived without awareness and consciousness or self-consciousness? Hasn't Socrates taught us to "Know thyself" and said that the unreflected/unexamined life is not worth living? Why did God forbid it? For our good? Or is that just an arbitrary command, given for no reason other than that it was He who gave it or given purely to show us that he is our lord and master and as an act asserting his authority over us (which amounts to the same thing)? And if he has given us reason, with the foreknowledge that we shall use it, willy nilly, why does he still forbid us from using it to learn about the difference between good and evil? Why does he wish to keep us ignorant of such knowledge and punish us for doing so? Is knowledge of good and evil the exclusive prerogative of God? And what about people in countries like China which has developed its morality free from any reference to the Christian God? If Chinese people know about good and evil, does that trespass upon God's prerogative, (assuming that it is God's exclusive prerogative)? I am afraid I don't understand it at all.
Whatever the true reason (if any) why God gave Adam and Eve that mysterious injunction against knowledge of good and evil may be, Merton says he agrees with St Bernard's understanding of the issue. He says that to St. Bernard, this "sapor mortis" (taste for death) is at the heart of original sin and that sapor mortis is the "exact opposite" of "sapida scientia"(existential tasting or knowledge of the divine good). I wonder if that sapor mortis is in some sense the "death instinct" [ thanatos as the polar opposite or instinct for eros (or life or love)] spoken of by Freud. Anyway, to them, "the existential knowledge of the goodness of God is only possible when we experience the goodness of God in himself, ie. as He Himself 'experiences' it". To Merton, our experience of the goodness of God is "an experience of infinite freedom, of infinite giving, infinite selflessness" but whilst the love that is in God is "experienced as given with infinite freedom", in us, that love is "experienced as received into the arms of our own finite and contingent freedom". To him, "There is no full and total experience of God that is not at the same time an exercise of man's fundamental freedom (of spontaneity) and of God's mercy. It is a free consent in an act of mutual giving and receiving that takes place between two wills, two 'persons', finite and infinite. Merton thinks that the only way in which we can receive "the fullness of divine love" is to "imitate His act of giving by surrendering ourselves completely to His love". This makes sense of to me. Experience has taught us that we feel happiest and most satisfied when we completely abandon ourselves into loving someone else or some activity or other, whether it be our mate, our children, our work, our vocation or our hobby with no thought for our "self". If we substitute for the word "God" the word "Tao" (as did Bishop John Wu of Hong Kong deceased), we will get an inkling of what it means to merge our finite and contingent "self" into something far greater than that limited "self".
Merton thinks that as a result of that primal pride and his false desire of "improving" his wisdom and knowledge through acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, Adam lost not only "the full experience of good that was freely given to him by God,...he lost his immortality, his contemplation, his power over himself and over irrational creation and finally even his status as a son of God...his immunity from disordered passion, his freedom from ignorance, his incapacity to suffer". But to Merton, "These deprivations were not merely the revenge of an irate God--they were inherent in the very attitude and act which constituted Adam's sin." He lost his immortality because he broke his soul's contact with God, its source of life and was thus left to his own contingency. He lost not his freedom of choice, but his freedom from sin, the freedom to attain without obstacle to that love for which he had been created: "He exchanged the spontaneity of a perfectly ordered nature elevated by the highest gifts of mystical grace, for the compulsions and anxieties and weaknesses of a will left to itself, a will which does not want to, hates what it ought to love and avoids what it ought to seek with its whole being."Since he had decided to depend upon himself. without contact with God, Adam has to become his own little god: everything had now to serve him, since he no longer served the Creator...But, precisely sinne he no longer fitted perfectly into the order in which they had all been established, all creatures rebelled against Adam, and he found himself surrounded not with supports but with so many reasons for anxiety, insecurity and fear. He was no longer to control even his own body, which became to some extent the master of his soul. His mind, now, since it no longer served God, toiled in the service of the body, wearing itself out in schemes to clothe and feed and gratify the flesh and protect its frail existence against the constant menace of death" Per St. Bernard: "the desire of earthy things, which are all destined for death, surrounded hims with thicker and thicker shadows, and the soul that thus lived could see nothing around about itself but the pale face of death appearing like a spectre everywhere....By enjoying perishable things as though they were its last ends, the soul has put on mortality like a garment. The garment of immortality remains underneath, not cast off, but discolored by the overcast garment of death" (Sermon 82 in Cantica #3) St. Bernard sees the fall not as a descent from the supernatural to the natural, but as a collapse into ambivalence in which the historical "nature" in which man was actually created for supernatural union with God is turned upside own and inside out and yet still retains its innate capacity and "need" for divine union.". The inner recesses of our conscience, where the image of God is branded in the very depth of our being, ceaselessly reminds us that we are born for a far higher freedom and for a far more spiritual fulfillment...the concrete situation in which man finds himself, as a nature created for a supernatural end, makes anguish inevitable. He cannot rest until he rests in God; not merely the God of Nature, but the living God, not the God that can be objectified in a few abstract notions, but the God who is above all concept. Not the God of a mere notional or moral union, but the God Who become Our Spirit with our own soul. This alone is the reality for which we are made. Here alone do we finally "find ourselves'--not in our natural selves but out of ourselves in God."
(To be cont'd)
Merton asks,"What was this sin?" That sin was first of all, "an attitude of mind". Before he committed the act of eating the forbidden fruit, the attitude was already there" "a way of looking at reality that condemned man, by its very nature, to become unreal...Adam who possessed an existential, an experimental knowledge of all that was good and all that was real, and who was mystically united with God, the infinite source of all actual and possible reality, wanted to improve on this by knowing something else, which he thought, would be something more.": the knowledge of evil. He wanted "an experience, an existential knowledge of evil, "not only to know evil by theoretical inference from good (which he could well have done without sin) but he wanted to know evil in a way in which it was not even known by God: i.e. by experience". The result according to Merton is that in wishing for something more, he reached out for what in fact was "disastrously less": "in finding "two" he has less, not more, than the original 'one'. And he lost his inheritance, which was the free possession of all good, as a son of God. He tasted and saw that evil was terrible. And he hated himself for it." To me, Adam did what Faustus did: he wanted an intimate knowledge of good and evil. It was a sin of greed, of avarice, of immoderation, a false hope for more intellectual, metaphysical and existential knowledge than is good for him. He says, "I think something of a Prometheus exploit was secretly implicit in the outlook that led Adam to eat of the one bad tree in the garden...that he was induced to 'steal' the experience of evil by an act of disobedience clearly indicates, it seems to me, that he felt that all the good that had come to him could, if were lost, be stolen back." ie. he wanted to steal something which he knew in advance does not properly belongs to him.
What was the kind of "theft" involved? And why does he say it was a "theft"? Adam failed to understand "the true nature of love...that the gifts which had been given to him could only be possessed as long as they were received as gifts. They were not and never could be won by right of conquest for that was impossible. To think otherwise was, in fact, completely to misunderstand the true nature of God." To return to the Promethean analogy, Merton says, "thinking that the fire could be stolen, and not knowing that it would be freely given, he unavoidably knew only false gods, not the living God. These false gods were beings only a little more than strong than man, only a little more spiritual, only a little more wise. They needed fire, in the end, as much as man. They would resent the theft of fire. They would defend themselves jealously against any invasion of their Olympus. They did not want man to have what was theirs, for they could not afford to see themselves weakened and man strengthened. All these concepts imply a narrow, jealous, weak, fearful kind of god.
Merton thinks that in reaching out his hand for the forbidden fruit, Adam "implied that the taste of evil was something God also might possibly be wanting...perhaps, something God feared to let him have, lest man be made too strong and become his equal.( And yet Adam was already the equal of God in the fullest sense possible to mere man short of union with Him in the eternal beatific vision which was to be the reward of his probation)". To him, "such a thought was only possible in one who had already ceased to know the true God."
Whilst one may agree with Merton that Adam's sin may consist in his pride, but one may well question whether it could be said that Adam was the equal of God "in the fullest sense" before the ate the forbidden fruit. But there is little doubt that Adam wanted to know and taste what it felt like to be God. To me, this desire is quite natural. Man is born with an insatiable desire to find out that which is unknown to him. That has been the motive force behind all our discoveries in science and the driving force of our technology. Man has a natural curiosity. Some of us possess more of it than others. We prefer if possible not only to be, but to know why we are what we are, what is good and what is bad for us and for others. It is a mystery to me why God does not desire man to know the difference between good and evil. Perhaps such a knowledge may not always add to our happiness. But it certainly adds to our awareness as man. And what kind of life is one which is lived without awareness and consciousness or self-consciousness? Hasn't Socrates taught us to "Know thyself" and said that the unreflected/unexamined life is not worth living? Why did God forbid it? For our good? Or is that just an arbitrary command, given for no reason other than that it was He who gave it or given purely to show us that he is our lord and master and as an act asserting his authority over us (which amounts to the same thing)? And if he has given us reason, with the foreknowledge that we shall use it, willy nilly, why does he still forbid us from using it to learn about the difference between good and evil? Why does he wish to keep us ignorant of such knowledge and punish us for doing so? Is knowledge of good and evil the exclusive prerogative of God? And what about people in countries like China which has developed its morality free from any reference to the Christian God? If Chinese people know about good and evil, does that trespass upon God's prerogative, (assuming that it is God's exclusive prerogative)? I am afraid I don't understand it at all.
Whatever the true reason (if any) why God gave Adam and Eve that mysterious injunction against knowledge of good and evil may be, Merton says he agrees with St Bernard's understanding of the issue. He says that to St. Bernard, this "sapor mortis" (taste for death) is at the heart of original sin and that sapor mortis is the "exact opposite" of "sapida scientia"(existential tasting or knowledge of the divine good). I wonder if that sapor mortis is in some sense the "death instinct" [ thanatos as the polar opposite or instinct for eros (or life or love)] spoken of by Freud. Anyway, to them, "the existential knowledge of the goodness of God is only possible when we experience the goodness of God in himself, ie. as He Himself 'experiences' it". To Merton, our experience of the goodness of God is "an experience of infinite freedom, of infinite giving, infinite selflessness" but whilst the love that is in God is "experienced as given with infinite freedom", in us, that love is "experienced as received into the arms of our own finite and contingent freedom". To him, "There is no full and total experience of God that is not at the same time an exercise of man's fundamental freedom (of spontaneity) and of God's mercy. It is a free consent in an act of mutual giving and receiving that takes place between two wills, two 'persons', finite and infinite. Merton thinks that the only way in which we can receive "the fullness of divine love" is to "imitate His act of giving by surrendering ourselves completely to His love". This makes sense of to me. Experience has taught us that we feel happiest and most satisfied when we completely abandon ourselves into loving someone else or some activity or other, whether it be our mate, our children, our work, our vocation or our hobby with no thought for our "self". If we substitute for the word "God" the word "Tao" (as did Bishop John Wu of Hong Kong deceased), we will get an inkling of what it means to merge our finite and contingent "self" into something far greater than that limited "self".
Merton thinks that as a result of that primal pride and his false desire of "improving" his wisdom and knowledge through acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, Adam lost not only "the full experience of good that was freely given to him by God,...he lost his immortality, his contemplation, his power over himself and over irrational creation and finally even his status as a son of God...his immunity from disordered passion, his freedom from ignorance, his incapacity to suffer". But to Merton, "These deprivations were not merely the revenge of an irate God--they were inherent in the very attitude and act which constituted Adam's sin." He lost his immortality because he broke his soul's contact with God, its source of life and was thus left to his own contingency. He lost not his freedom of choice, but his freedom from sin, the freedom to attain without obstacle to that love for which he had been created: "He exchanged the spontaneity of a perfectly ordered nature elevated by the highest gifts of mystical grace, for the compulsions and anxieties and weaknesses of a will left to itself, a will which does not want to, hates what it ought to love and avoids what it ought to seek with its whole being."Since he had decided to depend upon himself. without contact with God, Adam has to become his own little god: everything had now to serve him, since he no longer served the Creator...But, precisely sinne he no longer fitted perfectly into the order in which they had all been established, all creatures rebelled against Adam, and he found himself surrounded not with supports but with so many reasons for anxiety, insecurity and fear. He was no longer to control even his own body, which became to some extent the master of his soul. His mind, now, since it no longer served God, toiled in the service of the body, wearing itself out in schemes to clothe and feed and gratify the flesh and protect its frail existence against the constant menace of death" Per St. Bernard: "the desire of earthy things, which are all destined for death, surrounded hims with thicker and thicker shadows, and the soul that thus lived could see nothing around about itself but the pale face of death appearing like a spectre everywhere....By enjoying perishable things as though they were its last ends, the soul has put on mortality like a garment. The garment of immortality remains underneath, not cast off, but discolored by the overcast garment of death" (Sermon 82 in Cantica #3) St. Bernard sees the fall not as a descent from the supernatural to the natural, but as a collapse into ambivalence in which the historical "nature" in which man was actually created for supernatural union with God is turned upside own and inside out and yet still retains its innate capacity and "need" for divine union.". The inner recesses of our conscience, where the image of God is branded in the very depth of our being, ceaselessly reminds us that we are born for a far higher freedom and for a far more spiritual fulfillment...the concrete situation in which man finds himself, as a nature created for a supernatural end, makes anguish inevitable. He cannot rest until he rests in God; not merely the God of Nature, but the living God, not the God that can be objectified in a few abstract notions, but the God who is above all concept. Not the God of a mere notional or moral union, but the God Who become Our Spirit with our own soul. This alone is the reality for which we are made. Here alone do we finally "find ourselves'--not in our natural selves but out of ourselves in God."
(To be cont'd)
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