Revisiting Crittenden (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Monday, June 11, 2012, 21:17 (342 days ago) @ Sue

Thanks Sue, well, I don't know Paul Crittenden personally, and I can only go on what he has written in "Changing Orders". And as I said at the beginning, there is always a danger of reading things into something that someone has written that they did not intend. Crittenden does mention that Christian mystical tradition on page 350,

"One approach from early times, as im the writings of Justin and Clement of Alexandria tended towards a pure negative theology on the lines that God, being incomprehensible, can be characterised in negative terms only. This led on to the idea that, in relation to God, words fail, and what remains is silence. Perhaps this marks the opeing to the mystical, as in Wittgenstein's words, 'what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence'. This theme..took a particularly strong form in the writings of the mystical theologian, Dionysius....Dionysian thoughts about 'unknowing' as the path to union with the divine were deeply influential in the MIddle Ages and in later mysticism. Nontheless, the Christian tradition, especially in the West has been marked more generally in confidence in the power of discourse, logos as word, or reason, as a path to a certain understanding of what lies beyond understanding. Augustine voiced this powerfully in the fifth century and St. Thomas Aquinas developed the approach further in the Middle Ages."

After discussing how Aquinas went about this, he writes,

"...he went on to construct a vast body of discourse that seeks to bring the 'God of Metaphysics' to unite with the 'God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ'.

Crittenden then goes on to discuss Pascal, and the idea that by engaging in spiritual exercises, as if we believed, then we can arrive at genuine religious belief.

"But this patterm can hardly serve as an adequate basis for acquiring specific religious beliefs about God and the universe. If practice were enough, a person might come to believe amost anything - as the history of religion attests. The more common practical approach, equally problematic, has been to ground religious belief in a self-authenticating form of immediate experience. But which experience can be relied on to uncover true belief? The difficulty in this case is to show how personal experience could conceivably ground doctrinal teachings such as the Creed proclaims."

He then discusses Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, who provided an account,

"..in which belief in God consists fundamentally in the conviction that life has meaning, that our being is radically dependent, and that life is to be lived as subject to judgment. These are ideas that a thoughtful person could affirm. On the other hand, the sense in which they constitute beleif in God as a substative or defined for is unclear. For one might share these convictions in recognising human limits and responsibilities and in an effective commitment not to cease exploring 'the big questions' bequeathed from the metaphysical past and in being open to spiritual, ethical, and aesthetic value in the universe. Together with less certainty about human powers of thought in relation to the transcendent, or the universe as a whole, this outlook might manifest itself in a turn to negative theology, and a thoughtful acceptance of 'unknowing'. In that spirit, the doctrinal certainty of authoritative teaching gives way to a deeper place for poetry and metaphor, and for silence. That was where I had come to stand."

Now, whether you call this agnosticism, or not, is a matter of terminology, but it certainly looks like it to me. You have made this comment,

My own sense is that the search for the truth about the exustence of God begins from an agnostic or even an open-minded atheist position. However, only mystical experience (not a matter of effort, or of pathology, or of reasoning) can leap the chasm between agnostic and gnostic and end the search.

If the "mystical experience" is the touchstone for being agnostic or not, there is nothing that I can see in what Crittenden has written which would suggest that he has experienced or does experience that. But neither does he say he doesn't have it. But even assuming that one does have this experience through "poetry, metaphor and silence", that seems hardly enough to call yourself even a Cafeteria Catholic. I would have thought that the Catholic cafeteria would demand you order at least a bit more from the menu...