You say of this essay at the beginning, "it is not about women but about submitting to a moral order that exists outside of us." The parallel with your other work is a full one, if one supposes (as CS Lewis says) that we are all feminine in relation to God. Obviously, the point of the homology is not for a husband to arrogate to himself that status of a god in relation to his wife (that would be idolatry), but quite the opposite: to make a man cognizant of his own subsidiary position, and indeed the incompleteness of his own *masculinity*, compared to that of the Everlasting Man, to say nothing of the Father. To emulate Christ is to try to be more manly, one might say. As a newcomer to reading the Gospels, I am sometimes struck by how "toxic" Jesus is! (To use today's highly prejudicial term.) Put differently: He wasn't nice. He was commanding. This doesn't fit the impression one gets of Christianity as a casual observer of its present expressions, from which vantage it often looks so feminized.
But this is a side note. Your essay is so illuminating on the value of the idea of sin. Thank you! I hope L can find some of that peace that is available to the sinner.
Thank you for this comment, Matthew. Yes of course, we all feminine next to God.
And to be like Christ is certainly to be more manly. I wonder, though, is this also true for a woman? To be more manly, that is? Somehow I think it is not. But maybe she completes a man's manliness; she allows him to be complete as a man in relation to her. She gives him the occasion to love, without which he would remain in want, and incomplete. (So then what is she? If she doesn't become more manly, what does she do, then? She is the one who delights in his manliness! What joy is hers! Of course, there is a kind of manliness in recognizing herself as a kind of instrument for another's completeness, and doing so without resentment. That is the key.)
I think this might be true. She is *for* him. At least that is the thought experiment I am proposing here, and the one I am ready to stake my own life on outside of these pages.
Raised on a subsistence farm, in medical school I was appalled by my psychiatry professors' inability to discern right from wrong, and I wasted no insignificant amount of time bridling under their rule. I had to conform to pass, but it was like the little girl who, told to SIT DOWN! sits, but says under her breath, "I'm standing up on the inside."
The Alan Parsons Project nailed it perfectly in 1982: all Psychobabble.
A masterpiece of an essay--I shall re-read it several times and continue to reflect on the wonderful points you make with your matchless pellucid clarity. Your close and revelatory reading of Edmund in King Lear does remind me that Edmund is also the occasion for one of the very few (what seem to me) to be unambiguously misogynist observations in the works of Shakespeare: "The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us. That dark and fearful place where thee he got cost him his eyes."
I will re-stack this brilliant piece in the hope of nudging it farther out into the wide world where it deserves to read by countless literate and thoughtful people.
As all your essays, this one will require multiple reads to derive its best benefit. Thank you for it. It arrives in a most timely way. My fellow pastor and I sat yesterday with a parishioner on his back porch, witness and presence to his nearly paralyzing sorrow and fear. Tears were never far from the surface. His world has been undone by an unfortunate but all too commonplace development in his neighborhood. What to others would be an annoyance, to him is a disruption and violation of shalom, without and within. He is under the kind of treatment and therapeutic framework you describe. How I as pastor listen and love is my task, my struggle. Whether and how this essay might apply in our love and Word to him is now our task to process. As a side note, I, too, delighted in Mumford's essay in 2022--referred to it more than once in sermons in its wake. I wonder if you caught the letter to the editor by a renowned psychiatrist in his field in a subsequent issue, responding to Mumford's thesis. I am out of my depth to assess the dialectic between them. Regards, Patrick
It is so hard to know what to do to help someone struggling with mental illness. I am certain that I my many attempts have often caused more harm than good. It sounds like just sitting with your parishioner is the best practice. It is aloneness that hurts more than anything.
I had a look at the Steven Hayes essay you sent, and knew right off the bat that I would find it a frustrating read. For one thing, he seems to equate morality with living one's best life, or something, rather than with living within a spirit of gratitude, of unselfishness, of vitality, and of joy in beauty. He also seems to have no understanding of Christianity, if he thinks that "every major spiritual and religious tradition recognizes that the individual ultimately needs to affirm his or her own life direction, even if scripture and tradition provide a guide for these choices." Say what? What about losing your life to save it? What about taking up your cross? What about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin? These are not what we would be likely to consider affirming one's *own* life direction. Totally the opposite! It is the radical recognition that one's life direction leads to the dead end of self-centredness, and that following God's direction, though it might go against one's life, is enlarging and enlivening.
But here Hayes gets even worse: "what if as whole people we gravitate toward prosocial good once we get out of our own way and create the conditions that encourage human freedom and wisdom? What if values choices made in the context of greater self-kindness and cognitive openness, of connection and compassion toward others and the ability to attend to what is important, and of the ability to manifest values in behavior change are inherently likely to be loving and to have little to do with “moral relativism”? Why would that be? Well, perhaps because that is how social primates like us behave once these processes are in better balance."
I read this and think, has he ever met a toddler?
I am very suspicious of any philosophical system that doesn't hold one's own sinfulness at the core of it. Very suspicious. This is not to say that we are not also good. But I am unconvinced that we are as rosy as he paints us.
But of the course the whole problem seems to be one of *behaving* versus *being.* Hayes can't seem to see past socially acceptable behaviours as life's ultimate goal. This is an incredibly myopic view of the human.
At any rate, the response Hayes gives to Mumford seems in every way to bolster Mumford's thesis that a human has a soul and is not just "values."
That said, I haven't any doubt that certain mindful or reframing practices help people. Of course they do! But he seems to think that stopping a particular behaviour or maximizing another behaviour, or whatever, is the goal -- "being productive" -- without thinking past that. The goal towards...?
You say of this essay at the beginning, "it is not about women but about submitting to a moral order that exists outside of us." The parallel with your other work is a full one, if one supposes (as CS Lewis says) that we are all feminine in relation to God. Obviously, the point of the homology is not for a husband to arrogate to himself that status of a god in relation to his wife (that would be idolatry), but quite the opposite: to make a man cognizant of his own subsidiary position, and indeed the incompleteness of his own *masculinity*, compared to that of the Everlasting Man, to say nothing of the Father. To emulate Christ is to try to be more manly, one might say. As a newcomer to reading the Gospels, I am sometimes struck by how "toxic" Jesus is! (To use today's highly prejudicial term.) Put differently: He wasn't nice. He was commanding. This doesn't fit the impression one gets of Christianity as a casual observer of its present expressions, from which vantage it often looks so feminized.
But this is a side note. Your essay is so illuminating on the value of the idea of sin. Thank you! I hope L can find some of that peace that is available to the sinner.
Thank you for this comment, Matthew. Yes of course, we all feminine next to God.
And to be like Christ is certainly to be more manly. I wonder, though, is this also true for a woman? To be more manly, that is? Somehow I think it is not. But maybe she completes a man's manliness; she allows him to be complete as a man in relation to her. She gives him the occasion to love, without which he would remain in want, and incomplete. (So then what is she? If she doesn't become more manly, what does she do, then? She is the one who delights in his manliness! What joy is hers! Of course, there is a kind of manliness in recognizing herself as a kind of instrument for another's completeness, and doing so without resentment. That is the key.)
I think this might be true. She is *for* him. At least that is the thought experiment I am proposing here, and the one I am ready to stake my own life on outside of these pages.
Raised on a subsistence farm, in medical school I was appalled by my psychiatry professors' inability to discern right from wrong, and I wasted no insignificant amount of time bridling under their rule. I had to conform to pass, but it was like the little girl who, told to SIT DOWN! sits, but says under her breath, "I'm standing up on the inside."
The Alan Parsons Project nailed it perfectly in 1982: all Psychobabble.
https://youtu.be/G7uIfjCph9A?si=9dUjwra75OSwnDgE
A masterpiece of an essay--I shall re-read it several times and continue to reflect on the wonderful points you make with your matchless pellucid clarity. Your close and revelatory reading of Edmund in King Lear does remind me that Edmund is also the occasion for one of the very few (what seem to me) to be unambiguously misogynist observations in the works of Shakespeare: "The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us. That dark and fearful place where thee he got cost him his eyes."
I will re-stack this brilliant piece in the hope of nudging it farther out into the wide world where it deserves to read by countless literate and thoughtful people.
Thanks, Chris!
As all your essays, this one will require multiple reads to derive its best benefit. Thank you for it. It arrives in a most timely way. My fellow pastor and I sat yesterday with a parishioner on his back porch, witness and presence to his nearly paralyzing sorrow and fear. Tears were never far from the surface. His world has been undone by an unfortunate but all too commonplace development in his neighborhood. What to others would be an annoyance, to him is a disruption and violation of shalom, without and within. He is under the kind of treatment and therapeutic framework you describe. How I as pastor listen and love is my task, my struggle. Whether and how this essay might apply in our love and Word to him is now our task to process. As a side note, I, too, delighted in Mumford's essay in 2022--referred to it more than once in sermons in its wake. I wonder if you caught the letter to the editor by a renowned psychiatrist in his field in a subsequent issue, responding to Mumford's thesis. I am out of my depth to assess the dialectic between them. Regards, Patrick
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/is-morality-therapeutic
Thanks for this, Patrick.
It is so hard to know what to do to help someone struggling with mental illness. I am certain that I my many attempts have often caused more harm than good. It sounds like just sitting with your parishioner is the best practice. It is aloneness that hurts more than anything.
I had a look at the Steven Hayes essay you sent, and knew right off the bat that I would find it a frustrating read. For one thing, he seems to equate morality with living one's best life, or something, rather than with living within a spirit of gratitude, of unselfishness, of vitality, and of joy in beauty. He also seems to have no understanding of Christianity, if he thinks that "every major spiritual and religious tradition recognizes that the individual ultimately needs to affirm his or her own life direction, even if scripture and tradition provide a guide for these choices." Say what? What about losing your life to save it? What about taking up your cross? What about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin? These are not what we would be likely to consider affirming one's *own* life direction. Totally the opposite! It is the radical recognition that one's life direction leads to the dead end of self-centredness, and that following God's direction, though it might go against one's life, is enlarging and enlivening.
But here Hayes gets even worse: "what if as whole people we gravitate toward prosocial good once we get out of our own way and create the conditions that encourage human freedom and wisdom? What if values choices made in the context of greater self-kindness and cognitive openness, of connection and compassion toward others and the ability to attend to what is important, and of the ability to manifest values in behavior change are inherently likely to be loving and to have little to do with “moral relativism”? Why would that be? Well, perhaps because that is how social primates like us behave once these processes are in better balance."
I read this and think, has he ever met a toddler?
I am very suspicious of any philosophical system that doesn't hold one's own sinfulness at the core of it. Very suspicious. This is not to say that we are not also good. But I am unconvinced that we are as rosy as he paints us.
But of the course the whole problem seems to be one of *behaving* versus *being.* Hayes can't seem to see past socially acceptable behaviours as life's ultimate goal. This is an incredibly myopic view of the human.
At any rate, the response Hayes gives to Mumford seems in every way to bolster Mumford's thesis that a human has a soul and is not just "values."
That said, I haven't any doubt that certain mindful or reframing practices help people. Of course they do! But he seems to think that stopping a particular behaviour or maximizing another behaviour, or whatever, is the goal -- "being productive" -- without thinking past that. The goal towards...?
Thanks for sending this.
Keep running the good race!