Awakened by the Stars
Lorenzo Albacete † - Broadening Reason in an Age of Ideology.
I have seen the stars.
I went up to the highest tree.
In the whole poplar grove,
And saw thousands of eyes.
In my own darkness.
GARCIA LORCA
The Encounters of an Adventurous Snail" is about a rather serene snail, a gentleman of the forest who is not over-excited about anything. As he travels about, he runs into other animals. First he meets a bunch of frogs, who engage him in a very advanced discussion about the existence of God.
By itself, that would have been fascinating to consider, but then he moves on, and runs into a bunch of ants. They are beating up one of their own and are about to kill her. "Ladies, what's wrong?" he asks. "What has she done? Why are you doing this?"
It turns out that this ant had disappeared from the colony for a time; while she was marching along she didn't see a tree coming, and when the tree arrived, she just went straight up the tree. She always looked only directly ahead, so when she was going up the tree, she could see the sky. For the first time in her life, she saw stars. She finally came down and could not hold in the news of what she had discovered, thinking (poor thing) that those who heard her would want to see the stars themselves.
Instead, they were furious. With this stupid talk about stars, she had broken the law of utility. The ant's usefulness, as it is for all members of an ant colony, is to be a worker, and she had interrupted that work by doing something the others considered absolutely outrageous, irrelevant, and stupid: looking at the stars.
Of course, the snail himself has no idea what stars are because he's never looked up either, but he's intrigued and asks the dying ant, "What are stars?" She has no words to describe them. "They're like little eyes," and they are very beautiful.
Then she dies, and the other ants move on. The snail wonders about the meaning of what has happened, but he's just too tired to look up. Instead he continues his walk. In the distance you hear the bells of the church ringing.
It's a lovely poem, and it was a favorite of Monsignor Luigi Giussani. One day Giussani was walking around looking for a parking space, and he came upon two people making out in a car. He suddenly appeared in his cassock and said, "Hello." Well, you can imagine! When they saw him, he said, "I hate to interrupt; I just have one question to ask you: What you're doing now, what does it have to do with the stars?"
He had in mind this poem in which the stars represent infinity, the unknow-able. He had in mind that our selves are constituted by relationship and that we can discover ourselves capable of an inexpressible relationship with infinity, with the mystery-with the stars.
I want to stick to this point of departure-the stars. I want to zero in on the very point where the subject becomes an interesting question, a determining factor in one's life. Gazing at the stars can awaken us to the unpleasantness and the inhumanity of the dualism in which we live the kind of dualism that divides things like our faith and our work. Who wants to live such a life? Too much is needed to sustain this dualism, and along the way one of the sides tends to get ignored anyway.
Where does the reality of what we call "the stars" — the presence of the relationship of the mystery to us— enter into our human life, into our attempts to live a human life?
Following the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, I have chosen the term "the broadening of reason" as a point of contact, the fruit of the impact between the stars and the human person. So I want to consider how what we call "reason" can be impacted by faith in the area of human love.
Everybody knows what affection is: affectivity. (Although I'm sure if you look up "affectivity," you'll find page after page of some kind of encyclopedia which will quickly remove your affectivity for the subject matter at hand.) It's sym-pathy. Affectivity is what happens when you say, "You know, that's good stuff." This "good stuff" has two aspects to it. First, it's a judgment; it's an affirmation of reason. That's good stuff. And second, it's an affirmation of affection, sympathy.
Yeah, wow! That's good stuff. Reason and affectivity are very much interrelated in our daily experience, and therefore the broadening of reason must touch the broadening of affectivity.
What would it be like to have one's affectivity broadened? Again, we can search through our own experiences and see if there is something we can describe as a broadening, an intensification of affectivity. Are there experiences that make us care more about whatever is provoking the affectivity? The broadening of affect-ivity involves an increasing care, an increasing intensity. But remember, it should not be detached from reason. We should also experience an intensification in our ability to see what's there. And, in fact, affectivity does alter or impact what we see. It happens all the time. One guy comes to another guy and says that he has fallen in love-"I'm going crazy about her." And then the second guy says, "What the hell does he see in her?"
That's the point: he uses the word "see."
Let's go to West Side Story. Right before the song "Tonight," the word "see" comes up. Maria's concern is that when she looks at Tony she sees him as she does any other American, as a white person full of discrimination towards her because she's a dark Puerto Rican.
But, in fact, with Tony, the experience is different. She tells him: "No, when I look at you, I see only you." And then he says, "See only me, Maria." And then she launches into the song. It is lovely stuff. Affectivity and seeing are inseparable.
The stars broaden what you see and intensify your caring about it, and in this sense guide it. When we speak about what guides our behavior we are talking about ethics, values. And the fact is that when we live according to an ethical system that doesn't correspond to our affectivity, it's a disaster. It's an imposed morality, inhuman.
So in the search for an ethical basis in the world to help us tame power and guide ourselves in ways that are not destructive of our humanity, the Church proposes this broadening of reason-and this necessarily involves the question of affectivity.
Immediately we run into a problem. In the cultural moment we are living, affectivity has been detached from reason. Our experience of "caring for" —our experience of meaning, of value, of purpose, of that which gives intelligibility to life and makes life worthwhile, the sense of destiny, what moves me— that reality has been separated from reason.
And so in contemporary culture I discover two separate possibilities. One is the demand of pure, non-affective intelligence, and the other the pull of sheer, non-reasonable affectivity. In both cases, freedom dis-appears. We get first of all what John Paul II called "the tyranny of intelligence" and then the tyranny of emotions. The separation between reason and affectivity shows itself sooner or later in the manifestation of these two tyrannies.
I want to introduce another term. When they are operating in unison-when reason and affectivity are not separated - there occurs what we call experience.
Experience is the way reality emerges in our consciousness. Reality becomes transparent when an authentic human experience occurs. Again, human experience is born of this wedding between reason and affectivity.
Experience communicates to us the reality in which our presence is immersed. This is how that broadening occurs, by first becoming aware of the intensity of the real as something that has an impact on us, that we have encountered, that we did not create. The little ant who saw the stars knew very well they were not a product of her imagination. She had neither invented nor created them. Experience occurs because these two-reason and affectivity-remain together.
What happens next is the emergence, the taste, the grasping of real otherness.
What is there is other. If these two, reason and affectivity, are separate, the experience of otherness is not possible. Everything becomes the projection of the self. It is the experience of otherness that is at the origin of the experience of responsibility. It is the recognition of this reality, grasped through reason and affectivity working together, that the sense of responsibility is born in me. If that experience is absent, if reason and affectivity have been separated, then responsibility is imposed on me.
But perhaps I'm scared by that, I would not like to say that; I want to consider myself basically a responsible person, an ethical person, so I try to do my best, through my own efforts. That's moralism. If it is not born from the real recognition of the other-an affective, reasonable recognition of the other-this disappearance of responsibility in the area of friendship and love shows itself in what the Bible calls "lust."
To get a better sense of what I mean, consider Karol Wotyla's play, Our God's Brother. The main character Adam is struggling to get a sense of what responsibility means in the light of social injustice, in the light of his discovery that people are living in inhuman poverty in the places that he loves. This experience awakens his sense of responsibility, but he doesn't know what to do.
All kinds of people pop up with various proposals. According to the author, these are not real characters; these are aspects of Adam that he is working through within himself. One of them, "the Other," presents himself as a pure "intelligence." He describes himself: "I am an intelligence whose entire task is to reveal the true image of the world and not care for the rest."
"You too are an intelligence," he tells Adam. "That means you are subject to the laws of intelligence.. It is enough to hold the image of the world in your thoughts. You have no obligation to put its heavy burden on your back."
But Adam becomes aware of the limit of pure intelligence when he runs into a poor man reclining against a lamppost. He points the man out to the Other, but the Other cannot see him. Pure intelligence is not interested in this concrete individual. His gaze goes past him.
Adam says to him: There is a sphere in my thought that you do not possess. Which means that you do not grow out of my mind like my own thoughts. Ah, I have exposed you. I have done so with this image and likeness that you do not want to know.
This is a little fancy. Let's simplify it. The argument is that, aware of this "more" —the more that he has to see, know, take into account— Adam is able to resist these explanations that tempt him. Through the encounter with the poor, he has seen the stars, and he simply cannot get rid of that experience.
And pure intelligence is asking him to do just that. "I am an intelligence," he says. "That is enough for me." At this point, Adam says, "But the facts are against you. Do you see that man leaning against the lamppost?" And the Other says, "He does not attract my intelligence. He has ceased to be an issue for me. I can go past him."
Adam replies, "Oh how much is missing in you, how much you miss!" Later on, when Adam is going to confession, he says to the priest, "My greatest temptation is the thought that one can love with the intelligence, with the intelligence only, and that this will suffice." The split between intelligence and affectivity, the reduction of what we call experience shows itself as a limitation of vision, as a narrowing. It doesn't allow us to see the concrete. It only allows us to see only the generic.
The difficulty we have in finding common ground for a way of life that responds to our affectivity and our sense of responsibility is a problem, says Giussani, that "is above all a crisis of reason." Until this is dealt with, a split will occur between the subject of action—1, myself, who I am—and reality, whether it's in politics, in economics, in science, or in personal relations. Our encounter with the stars-the birth of faith-addresses this problem and begins to heal it.
According to Giussani, we are suffering from three great reductions of reason.
In the first reduction, ideology-the abstract world of pure "intelligence"— prevents us from having a true experience of the event generated by our contact with reality. An event attracts our affectivity and reason, but when the split occurs, ideology takes the place of reason. Giussani describes ideology as "the logical discourse that starts with a prejudice and wishes to retain it and impose it." The experience of faith, the appearance of the stars, is a response. It comes from that discovery of otherness, from something that enters your life, an event.
And it will free reason from this reduction to ideology. It will configure us— guide us, if you wish. It will configure a way of standing before reality. The way in which we look at it is an expansion of our looking, a change in our gaze before reality.
The second reduction is the reduction of the sign to mere appearance. A sign is when a reality you grasp, you see, points toward an other. The path of your deeper growth both in knowledge and affectivity is a moving from sign to sign.
And the ability to grasp the sign, to follow a path, is the only way you will reach the mystery, since mystery is the depth of the sign. "Mystery," says Giuss-ani, "becomes experience through the sign." But when the split occurs, the sign disappears.
You might say that the sign fails to signify, remaining as it does at the level of an ever-changing superficiality, devoid of content. We are caught in the tyranny of appearance. When we have lost the ability to grasp the sign, then there's no reality that the sign points to, and the objectivity of the mystery, if you wish, also disappears, and the mystery question, the stars question, becomes pure abstract discussion.
Finally, the third reduction is a reduction of what the Bible calls the "heart" to pure feelings. The heart—the seat of our affectivity-rules over our personal dedication and fidelity. In this reduction, love becomes nothing more than sen-timentality.
But sentiments cannot guide us along the path of dedication and fidelity. Instead, the heart is precisely reason through objectivity. The broadening of reason intensifies, purifies our affectivity.
Again, affectivity caring-for, attraction, sentiments-all of these can be brought together by talking about looking, about the way we look at reality. Our outlook—which literally means "looking out," the way I look away from myself— is the stage, I propose to you, at which the impact between faith and affectivity takes place.
One of the best proposals of how the stars affect our looking on the level of affectivity, personal love relationships, is found in the now-famous book that was for many years ignored: The Theology of the Body. Although he wrote this before he was even pope, John Paul presented it over several years, as the content of his Wednesday audiences.
Prior to this time, popes would generally use these weekly public moments to say a beautiful, inspired thing or two, but John Paul Il sat there and read a philosophical treatise. I remember somebody asked him, "Aren't you concerned? Nobody understands anything." And he said, "They only come for the show. I can do that and in the meantime I get this stuff out, and it can be published."
At one point he discussed the words from the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus says that "Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Mt 5:28). (Those of you who are old enough might remember that the phrase "adultery in the heart" was made popular by Jimmy Carter.) The pope examined the phrase "looking with lust." What does that mean? How does it happen? How do we get out of it?
He said two things: First of all, although in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is speaking of a man looking at a woman with lust, it also applies in reverse; it also means a woman looking at a man with lust. Second, the teaching on adultery is not limited to a question of looking at somebody else who's not your wife, an extra-marital problem. Within marriage a husband can look at a wife with lust and vice-versa. And that is the same as adultery: it is adultery in the heart.
Well, when the Pope said that, the whole world reacted. "There the Catholic Church goes crazy once again against sexual pleasure. Now, even in marriage you can have sinful thoughts!" There were some serious editorials and some satirical columns making fun of the pope and the Church, so much so that the Vatican felt it had to issue a clarification.
But these points are important for what we are considering here. Listen to the words that describe this phenomenon of "looking with lust": "a deception of the human heart in the perennial call of man and woman." This perennial call is an "attraction," something we can consider without even mentioning men and women. We could say that "looking with lust" is a deception, a lack of the human heart in the personal call of love, "a call revealed in the mystery of creation— to communion by means of mutual giving." A call inscribed in the heart itself, the perennial attraction that occurs through a mutual gift of self, is what is affected by lust. John Paul II calls it "an intentional 'reduction,' almost a restriction or closing down of the horizon of man and his heart."
This is amazing. The "heart" is the I, the self; it's everything. He is saying that lust closes the door to the horizon of man. It is a reduction of the other to being simply a suitable "object for gratification." It is the reduction of sexuality itself, an "obscuring of the significance of the body, and of the person itself." Femininity and masculinity thus cease being "a specific language of the spirit." They lose their "character of being a sign." And this reduction takes place, he says, "in the sphere of the purely interior act expressed by the look. A look... is in itself a cognitive act."
This is the heart of the problem. Because we have separated reason from affectivity, "looking" is separate from its cognitive dimension, the fact that it is an act of reason. Speaking of how we "look" at something, we say, "well, that's your perspective." Sight becomes a purely individual perspective. Whereas John Paul Il insists, "It is a cognitive act." It is the outcome of a judgment about reality.
This same thread is picked up in the first part of the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, in which Benedict XVI gives us a fascinating discussion of love. Human love begins with an attraction that always includes sexuality. It begins that way and it undertakes a path, a path that moves from sign to sign. In examining the two classical Greek words, eros and agape, he identifies precisely how faith begins to impact the experience of affectivity and love. For Benedict, the impression that our faith considers eros and agape as opposed is a misperception (although, it must be confessed, the Church has often expressed herself in such a way as to give that appearance).
This was Nietzsche's great accusation against Christian-ity, that it had destroyed eros, the erotic, for the sake of the spiritual abstraction called agape- charity, love, divine love. Benedict says that isn't so. In fact, the purpose of revelation grasped by faith is the presence of the divine in the erotic, and—at this point I should veil my face-the presence of the human in the divine.
This is the proposal. It's where faith (the stars) enters in and broadens, purifies.
Here, it is proposed that what we call faith above all is the healing of our humanity. What we suffer from, whatever its origin, we must overcome this wound, this disaster, this separation of reason from affectivity.
Relevance of the Stars. Lorenzo Albacete. by Lorenzo Albacete (Author), Lisa Lickona (Editor), Gregory Wolfe (Editor)
https://a.co/d/9eQwkWA
