Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: A series of lectures and a body of material which is not a body of material that many of us often explore. Which gives us an insight into the life and feeling of Christian people down through the ages in a way that many of were not dramatically aware of before. Doctor Miles gave us her general subject, the incarnation in practice of Christianity, a historical perspective. She's
given us this historical perspective and the lecture today is "Christian Practice in the Nuclear World." In case you didn't know, that's the present world: today. And we're looking very forward -- very much to the summation and conclusion of what you had to say, Doctor Miles. And for your contribution today.
MILES: Thank you. I appreciate very much and have enjoyed the opportunity of talking with you during this week. Thank you for your attention and your interest and your questions in both this conversation, which is much too one sided for me, and in the many conversations that I've had with some of you around the lectures. I mentioned to you,
in the first occasion that I spoke, that the Stone lectures come from a larger project. So now I'm going to give that larger project a one-minute spot. A book that will be coming out in the fall with Crossroad Press called "Practicing Christianity: Critical Approaches to an Embodied Spirituality" extends what we
have been talking about here and addresses some other topics. If, then, I have not addressed and responded to everything you ever wanted to know about the history of devotion in these lectures, you may want to take a look at that volume. I guarantee that won't do it either, but at least it's a little more systematic account of historical resources in relation to the
world in which we live. We have been, up to now, examining the rich, strong metaphors by which historical Christians were urged to imagine their lives as Christian. Imitation of Christ, pilgrimage, ascent, and battle. There are many more metaphors, of course. Though, perhaps, not quite as popular as those. Christian
life as athletic contest or, in a familiar nautical image, as piloting one's fragile vessel across a stormy sea. Hymns and paintings as well sermons too, as well as devotional manuals developed these metaphors. I hope I've not been so eager to expose their assumptions, risks, and dangers that you have
not glimpsed, from time to time, their tremendous richness. Their polyvalence and their power. Yet, they are not, I think, the greatest resource of devotional manuals; those metaphors. The worth of a religious life depends ultimately, not on what can be imagined or conceived, but on what can be embodied. Even
more fundamental, then, to Christian life than the governing and value-laden metaphors are the religious practices by which the insight or complex insights are articulated in metaphors is realized, is made real, in a person's life. The centrality of practices to the process of coming to understand has been obscured
by the privileging, our practice really, of privileging, insight over the exercises that prepare and produce new insight, new understanding. In the twentieth century, a secular privileging of intellectual and psychological understanding has influenced the way we think about religious history. And has led to a widespread
assumption that change in behavior follows, rather than precedes, insight. Thus, for example, psychoanalysis and psychotherapies precede by creating from a narration of the patient's experience a new, more cohesive, more comprehensive and more fruitful life story. A life story that permits the
patient to revision and revise counterproductive or destructive patterns of thought and behavior. That the process of psychotherapy irreducibly involves, in contemporary secular dress, some ancient religious practices of confession, repentance, contemplation, and new commitment, has not been an object of focus.
Rather, the objects of public attention and debate have been on theories of psychological structures. And the most effective methods by which patients can learn to recognize the patters of their own experience. In contrast to this 20th century prejudice toward intellectual understanding, most historical people thought it obvious that insight follows change.
Changed behavior, changed activities produce insight. Long before what we now call the scientific method was spelled out by Francis Bacon, Christian authors were well aware of the possibility of the experimental reproduction of religious experience. By reconstituting each of the conditions, a certain physical condition,
certain beliefs, certain exercises that had created that experience for earlier candidates. From the same conditions and steps the same results were likely to be obtained. After the religious experience had once been produced, its maintenance was relatively simple. Maintenance of the original experience consisted of the gradual
articulation of a detailed reconstruction of reality. A reorganization and summary of all the facts of experience in a more satisfying hypothesis than that formally held. The first deconstructive moment, usually as described by devotional manuals, was repentance. Repentance
combined a detailed introspection with tears of remorse. Tears were themselves condition and proof of physic malleability. There are all kinds of instructions given in devotional manuals for making this sense of repentance, of collecting one's former life in a very negative scenario for making
that repentance vivid to the person. Jeremy Taylor, in a popular devotional manual of the seventeenth century, advises that while most of us manage to keep the activities of which we are ashamed sort of nicely separated from one another in our minds so that they appear to be only once every so often that these have occurred, he says that
you collect them all from your whole life and then you sit with them. So there were tactics, strategies for producing this repentance. And then repentance created a condition in which the person was vulnerable to suggestion, willing to exchange the patchwork of former experience. Which by now appears pitifully shabby for the new
religious interpretation of experience. So practices both prepared the conditions under which religious experiences were likely to occur and subsequent to those experiences, provide a life style that integrates and perpetuates them. There is primarily or initially the deconstructive moment, where one's former experience is reinterpreted, and
then the constructive practices, that help the person to build a new life around that religious experience. In the past, hours spent in solitary prayer and meditation, tearful repentance, deprivation of food and sleep, routine physical work, exposure to cold, self-denying service to others, any combination of these and other practices was considered
crucial to the cultivation of a religious self. It was understood that without the creation of a dehabituated body a permeable psyche is not possible. So the method described by Christian authors precedes from dehabituation of the body to deconditioning of the socialized psyche. As the condition of the body is altered by ascetic practices, the
psyche loses its fix, its grip on former interpretive frameworks. The particular practices advocated by different devotional manuals determine, to a large extent, the kind of religious self that resulted from those practices. The aspects of functions of human beings that were engaged, cultivated, and trained by Christian
practices were affirmed and honored. Those not engaged were inevitably understood as less central to the practice of Christianity. In addition, it's important not to confuse practices that deconstruct the phenomenal self, the socialized self, with practices that construct, practices that exercise and strengthen the fragile new
religious center. Both devotional manuals said were needed. They implicitly, if not explicitly, followed Augustan's principal: you must be emptied of whatever you are full of in order to be filled with something of which you are empty. Ascetic practices represented one of the most important
deconstructive strategies. Christian authors have understood ascetic practices as a shift of erotic attachment from sensible objects to a spiritual object. Their estimation of the greater beauty of spiritual objects over sensual objects has masked the fact that what was really at stake was not a rhetoric about the objects at all, but a
relocation of the self. A consciously chosen self was created. By systematically dismantling the self automatically created in every society by socialization. So the real point of ascetic practices was not to give up objects, but to deconstruct the socialized self. The self whose very desire has been formed by culturally
approved objects. Indeed, and from our perspective, quite interestingly, a fringe benefit of temporary renunciations is the sensory intensification that inevitably occurs as a result of the deprivation. By deprivation sensory habituation is dismantled. The result is what Thomas Aquinas called the renewal
of the senses. Ascetic practices can relieve sensory fatigue. Periods of silence, of sexual abstinence, of solitude or of fasting, readily demonstrate the extent to which the senses habituate and fatigue. Becoming in the course of ordinary living what one modern author has called 'data reduction
agencies.' Rather than alert observers of the world of sounds, smells, sights, and touch, ascetic practices can break the bondage of the senses to the psyche's agenda. A form of habituation in which any stimulus that does not related directly to physical and psychic protection is ignored. Michelle Foucault in the 20th century wrote, "The soul
is the prison house of the body." Inverting the Platonic maxim that was so frequently cited by Christian authors. If we go on to look at some of the other practices that are advocated by devotional manuals, we find worship and sacraments, participation in worship and sacraments,
another practice that has potential, I think, for being an important practice in our own time. Devotional manuals, however, by definition, where written already for people affiliated with the worshipping community. People who wanted to deepen an intensify their practice of Christianity. Who wanted to extend it beyond the basic requirements
and into voluntary practices that went further than was required. Because manuals addressed readers who are eager to go beyond the mandatory practices, most devotional manuals really have little to say about the regular worship of Christian communities. Yet, there is an implicit insistence in the idea that people are expected
to participate in worship and sacraments on community. As the place where religious -- where the religious self can be developed maximally. Where there is the essential support, encouragement, critique, reassurance, and so on, to provide the context for such development. Perhaps the reason that devotional
manuals seems puzzling in not emphasizing, most of them, the need for communal worship is that to emphasis worship would be to automatically emphasis community. While their project is to pressurize the individual. The pilgrim Christian did not attend weekly services on his way to the celestial city.
Yet, we perhaps recognize more clearly now, than our ancestors did, that the construction of an individual subject is not, cannot be, a solitary undertaking. The resources are simply not there, unless one is in community. If one is intent on altering socialization, as women, for example, have learned, the first requirement is to find
a group with whom to work. Devotional manuals, I suspect, took community for granted, because they may have found it hard to escape community in their face-to-face societies. So they emphasized the individual. We in the isolation of modern life, I think, find it automatic that we think of ourselves as
individuals. And so, our rhetoric needs to point in the direction of insisting on community. None of this language occurs in a vacuum; it almost requires a reading of what we already do with too much facility, too readily, too automatically, and then trying to correct for that. The varieties of instructions on prayer, meditation, and contemplation, reveal
that those practices also to be one of the most important constructive practices for the strengthening of a religious self. Practices of prayer, meditation, and contemplation have been written about voluminously. Many techniques, many particular techniques, were described. Martin Luther wrote, "There is no Christian who was too busy to pray without ceasing."
And the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian orthodox devotional manual "The Way of the Pilgrim" describes a mode of prayer whose goal is cumulatively to include the body in prayer. To, what he calls, pray with the heart. And I quote, "Really to pray means to direct the mind and hear to constant remembrance of God.
To walk in God's divine presence, to arouse in oneself the love of God by means of meditation, and to say the name of Jesus in harmony with ones breathing and the beating of one's heart. One begins this process by vocally repeating the holy name of Jesus Christ at all times, in all places, and in all occupations, without interruption."
Troubled by the scriptural injunction to pray without ceasing, the pilgrim attempted to figure out how that can be done and to do it. Adopting this simple prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me" he gradually progressed from a rote recital of that prayer to engraving the prayer so firmly in his consciousness and body that it seemed involuntary. He
began with repetition of the prayer 3,000 times daily, at the direction of his spiritual instructor. And the pilgrim reports that the Jesus prayer eventually seems to repeat itself involuntarily. Quote, "After a while, I felt that the prayer was somehow entering the heart by itself. The words of the prayer seemed to be formulated according to the rhythm of the heartbeat. I stopped
vocalizing the prayer and began to listen, attentively, as my heart spoke." Techniques like this, and many others, are one of the staples of devotional manuals. The techniques that are discussed are many and varied. They use as focusing
devises words or visual images, bodily postures, visualizations, reading, walking, or imageless, wordless concentration. They are all in different way methods for gather and focusing energy. For exercising and
strengthening the religious self. Another range of practices that was advocated as a way of constructing a new self revolves around a service to others. Which is often presented as
the ballast, the correction, for the heavy concentration on one's own spiritual condition. Yet, from the New Testament times forward, Christian authors advocated forms of service that have begun in the twentieth century to be questioned. Care for the poor and the sick, charity to the needy,
hospitality to strangers, and visiting those in prison. Although consistently urged in the strongest terms in the gospels and throughout the history of Christianity, are no longer routinely done by most Christians. Good works that temporary alleviate individual pain through charity seems to many Christians today to be
rather inadequate responses to the needs of the world. Ironically, the self-denial that was traditionally associated with Christian service has become in contemporary usage a pejorative term. Implying the existence of thinly disguised motives of self-promotion. Modern people have become, and probably rightly,
suspicious of such traditional formula as God first, others second, myself last. We recognize that in genuinely altruistic activity the one who serves feels herself to be fully gratified and rewarded by the experienced gained the process of serving. Neither heavenly reward nor
self-denial as an end in itself should motivate service to humanity. Rather contemporary people who work with prison inmates, in shelters for battered women, with abused children, and in soup kitchens, insist that these job are immediately and richly rewarding. Personally gratifying and full of opportunities for self-knowledge and learning.
If service though, is not performed as penance, as traditional devotional manuals frequently urge. If service is not offered up, that is, done specifically and pointedly for Christ and not for the person benefited, then what makes service Christian? Perhaps, it is Christian service only in the sense that one can specify how
an activity relates to values associated with one's practice of Christianity. In spite of frequently abuse of the concept of Christian service, the practice of a wide range of activities based on sensitivity to the needs of others cannot be abandoned. Perhaps, at the end of the 20th century, the rhetoric of Christian service, loaded as it is with connotations of
covert complacency, has become irredeemably counterproductive. The minimalist approach of relating one's service activities to values associated with Christianity may be the best rational for Christian service today. Understood in this way, a Christian's impetus for service to others and to society is the result of the confidence and
self-esteem of one who understands experientially the Christian claim that love is the origin and goal of human life. And that one's very existence is itself the gift of a God who has no other defining characteristic than love. Loving service from the perspective of this interpretation is simply gratitude for being acted out.
In short, I suggest that many of the practices associated with devotional manuals -- excuse me -- have more to offer for a contemporary practice of Christianity, than do the traditional inspirational metaphors that we spoke about on other days. Within the very wide
range of instructions in practices, lies profound awareness of a carefully tailored method for weaving Christian attitudes into lifestyle. Since Christian faith is, must be, consciously chosen, rather than sort of picked up through socialization or introjected from the secular culture at large,
the problem of Christian devotion is precisely this conscious aspect of it. Is precisely how to work Christian faith into the deeper levels of human being. The unchosen, unconscious, perceptual levels. Otherwise, we remain secular people, thinly topped by some Christian ideas.
If this is not done. That's what the practices were all about. That weaving of Christian faith into the deeper than conscious levels of one's operation. The cumulative, incremental, infiltration of Christianity into the body. The senses, once responses. The rhetoric surrounding
practices may present, and does present, difficulties. But many of the practices themselves can be reinterpreted, cleansed of their dualistic or individualist or privatistic allegiances and used to minister to the nuclear world. I'd like to suggest in the next few minutes, that the Christianity terribly needed in the nuclear world could
be characterized as an embodied Christianity. A Christianity systematically tailored to be in the world. The religion of the word made flesh. Let me try to just sketch this. Perhaps the greatest difficulty for us in a 2,000-year tradition of instructions in the practice of Christianity, is
the continuity of agreement that we've seen during the week on the importance of transcending the physical conditions of human life. No other devotional theme so clearly illustrates my claim that Christian tradition is both rich in resources for a contemporary practice of Christianity, and also, in some respects, deeply problematic.
Although in twentieth-century theological discourse, the word transcendence connotes no more than a kind of self-awareness of consciousness of one's life, the human possibility of transcendence has, usually, in historical Christianity, been interpreted as the belief that it is not only possible, but highly desirable to despise, ignore, or use the
material conditions of human life in such a way that the soul can spring free of those conditions. To contemplate and enjoy God in a disembodied and timeless state. Enjoyment of God is, to be sure, imperfect and fleeting in this present life, devotional manuals say. But still powerful enough to wean our loves and our longings from the Earth, from
other human beings, to heavenly bliss. This interpretation of human transcendence has, I suspect, substantially contributed to creating the nuclear world. A world more effectively despised than even the harshest medieval ascetic could have imagined. Although we have done some historical contextualization, and
that may help us to understand why historical Christian talked about the soul's superiority over the body, this is not to explain away the destructive ramifications of their notion of self-transcendence. The transcendence of body by soul provided a model of dominance and subordination that was used to rationalize unjust social arrangements as well as plunder of the
natural world. In addition, belief in the transcendence and greater value of the soul's rational powers over physical existence in the context of the patriarchal societies of the Christian West, has led a long series of Christian authors to insist that rationality most strongly in man, while women are associated with body, and body with sin, and sin with death.
Rationality, the male prerogative has been equated with power and power with force and force with dominance throughout society and across societies with war. The dominance of men over women in familial and social hierarchies was also advocated a analogous to the transcendent relationship of God over the world.
Similarly, the so-called natural dominance of human over plant and animal life has seemed even more obvious to historical writers. Together with the scriptural injunction to conquer and subdue the Earth, the superiority of humans has been understood as a license for man to exploit the natural world and all sub-human living creatures.
Today, animals suffer the effects of human aggression even more dramatically than they have in the past. They are tortured for scientific experimentation, produced and cared for in order to be killed and used as food, and the natural habitats of wild animals are rapidly being destroyed. Many species are presently in danger of extinction. Human transcendence of the natural
world has also been cited as a rationalization of the irresponsible use of the Earth's natural resources. Now dangerously depleted. But it is perhaps human beings and some human beings more than others, who suffer the most direct results of human transcendence of nature. It is an ironic feature of the present secular transformation of
traditional values, that one of the continuities is a contemporary failure in North American culture, as well as in other of the so-called developed countries, adequately to care and value -- care for and value human bodies. Even in North America, one of the wealthiest countries of the world, staggering numbers of people suffer from hunger and distress. Moreover,
many financially secure North Americans fail even to care adequately for their own bodies. The prevalence of such practices of alcoholism, drug dependence of all kinds, over and under eating, overwork, a killing life pace, and pollution of the environment, demonstrates this. But failure adequately to value human bodies is evident in its
most undisguised form in the nuclear world, in which all living bodies exist in constant jeopardy. In contrast to the neglect and disparagement of physical life, advised by devotional manuals and translated without that much change into twentieth-century secular life, the cultural self-image of contemporary North American society is one of hedonism.
Belligerent enjoyment of physical delights and fanatical maintenance of the body beautiful. A reaction to the traditional Christian antipathy to the body, this affirmation of body at the expense of the development of a religious self may be a necessary stage in the reintegration of the physical part of human beings. Yet, contemporary
statistics, as well as a resource like contemporary novels, support my suspicion that, ultimately, physical wellbeing and pleasure cannot bear the pressure under which they are placed when life is organized entirely around achieving them. What has not yet been managed, either by communities of Christians or by North American secular culture
is an integration of all the capacities of human beings. A sort of second naivety, a centered and developed self fully invested in and grateful for its material conditions: body, senses, nature, and society. Christianity in the nuclear age must reconstruct the traditional idea of self-transcendence that has
contributed to distain for the natural world and the material condition of life. Instead of interpreting human transcendence in the direction of that potential, for body denying, world rejecting, escapism, we must reinterpret transcendence as a recognition of the interdependence of all living beings. Christians must locate the
ideas, the images, the practices. Surely not an impossible task in the religion of the incarnation. That helps us, perhaps for the first time in the history of Christianity, fully to value, cherish, and treasure the natural world. We must reconstruct the idea of self-transcendence as an imperative to enter more deeply into the demanding,
religious discipline of physical existence and all it implies. In spite of the difficulties and dangers of the dominate traditional idea of self-transcendence, however, 20th century people are, perhaps more than ever, in need of a concept that emphasizes the importance of overcoming the isolation temptations of individualism and narcissism.
As never before, Cicero's statement, "We are all linked together in a common chain," is not just a metaphor but concretely accurate. In a world in which we could all die together, we are literally linked together in a common chain. Yet the historical understanding of the way
to formulate that linkage together of all human beings was religious unity or uniformity. And this, I think, is no longer an option in the 20th century. Devotional manuals agreed that there is a Christian life. Now they all sketch a different looking one, but each of them proposed to define for their readers not a Christian life, a
workable suggestion for a practice of Christianity, but the Christian life. Although the pluralism of Christian traditions has been denied by this kind of a universalism rhetoric, Christianity is, and has historically been, pluralistic. In beliefs, creeds, and liturgical and devotional practices in different geographical settings, as
well as over the 2000 years of its existence. The pluralism of Christianity, it is probably safe to say, has not, though, been celebrated as one of its strengths. On the contrary, every effort has been made to compel uniformity of belief and practice. And to eradicate pluralism. If necessary, by executing tens of thousands of human beings who
wanted nothing more than to be Christians according to their own convictions. Because Christian traditions have not accepted pluralism, differences among people within communities, then individualism, the self-isolation of people who recognize few connections with or responsibilities to other human being and society,
has resulted. Because there has not been a permission and a delight in pluralism, individualism, self-isolation has occurred. In the last decade of the twentieth century can be not -- can be countered not only by uniformity -- and not best by uniformity, but by pluralism. That is, acceptance of, respect
for, and eventually, delight in the differences of perspective and concern among Christians. Devotional manuals have been one of the methods by which Christian people were trained to a religious uniformity that concealed the injustices of the societies in which they lived. Devotional manuals seemed to address all Christian people by advocating the same
practices, attitudes, and values. Only when we look at a range of different manuals and see how really different the attitudes and practices enjoined are across the genre, do we get the kind of sense of the breadth of that information. In fact, however, and in location historically, they effectively reinforced the social,
class, and gender conditioning of many people. By offering corrective devises addressed only to those who were trained and support by social and political institutions to pride aggression and forgetfulness of the needs of others. Now I do not question the fruitfulness for many historical people of use of the advice given by devotional manuals.
But I suggest that the pluralism of twentieth-century religious discourse has, in a sense, rendered such devotional manuals obsolete. Has revealed a fundamental contradiction in the assumption that the same practices and ideas can correct the socially constructed temptations of all Christians. Christian tradition's emphasis on the individual must
also in the twentieth century be addressed. Not only be commitment to face -- to face-to-face communities, but also by transcending the privatism of traditional descriptions of Christian life. The world desperately needs Christians that consider it a central of their religious duty to participate in social action. That feel responsibility, not only for the development of a
private religiosity, but also for the public sphere. In our time, the cultivation of a religious self is more crucial than ever. But the model can no longer be either that of isolation individuals fleeing from the wrath to come. Nor can it be one of uniformity of belief and practice. The question, then, comes to be can people, who do not necessarily
agree on all matters of belief and practice, act together? Can people who do not feel a strong claim to a universal imperative gather energy for social action? The French philosopher Michel Foucault practiced commitment to action without claiming universal rightness. He was frequently asked to explain how he could act if he weren't convinced that his action
was the result of universal principles. He said in an interview, "The ethical, political choice each of us has to make every day is to determine what is the main danger and to focus our energies there." This principal of personal responsibility is a promising for twentieth-century Christians.
Everyone does not have to agree on what the main danger is, if we can agree that this danger is probably not a single danger. Each person can focus her effort on what she identifies as the main danger, reassured and strengthened by the awareness that others are focusing their efforts on other dangers that they take to be the most pressing. To act as a historical subject is to take
the risk and responsibility of deciding on the focus of my efforts without requiring that they be supported and reinforced by the efforts of everyone else in sight. It is, finally, to be grateful that I need not consider my efforts normative for everyone, but that others are correcting the one sidedness, the inevitable one sidedness of my vision by addressing dangers that my experience
has not sensitized me to. So the overcoming of real differences among Christian people, what Christians believe and what they value, and what they consider main danger, should not be the goal of religious discourse in our time. Rather dialogue in which particularity and difference is respected is an opportunity to repair the limited vision of each of us.
The literature of Christian devotion has had an influence in the creation of the contemporary world. Preoccupation with death, transcendence of souls over bodies, universal prescriptions that ignore differences of gender conditioning, social location, and perspective. All of these attitudes were translated by devotional literature into practices that
wove them into the lives of individuals and societies in the Christian West. Often, instead of providing alternatives, they reinforced social conditioning, socialization. Exposing and acknowledging the limitations of devotional literature, however, does not negate its vision of the possibility of a human life thoughtfully chosen,
actively embodied by daily exercise, and bodied forth with gratitude and responsibility. The practical project -- the project of practice that is that of devotional manuals was ultimately to designate the energy and to provide methods for the constructive -- the construction of critical perspective on one's society.
That project has never been so crucial. Ironically the nuclear world that demands that we consider the ultimate meaning of human life in the face of threat of massive death is also in the public realm a secular world. A world in which questions of ultimate meaning cannot be addressed. In this situation, Christianity as the numerically dominate
religious orientation of North Americans, is, I think, under immense responsibility to attempt to provide the ideas, the images, the practices that insist one respect for the created world and for living beings. We must, I think, publically and explicitly reject the body-despising, world-denying strain of traditional Christian
spirituality that has come to be the secular world's caricature of Christianity. And we must seek and exercise and body-forth those Christian practices that help to revision an embodied spirituality. A spirituality that loves creation and that practices the strenuous disciplines of loving relationship, community, and care for
the fragile and vulnerable earth that is our home.