Quid est Veritas?
In Memoriam to CS Lewis
- Feb 27, 2016
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Identity is a complex chimaera of often conflicting ideas. It is not just the parents, the society, at play - there is self-identity and ascribed identity. Wider layers of an onion, Or perhaps a weird soup. What you believe has to be the product of what influenced you, but this can be both in emulation or antithesis. Further, humans are nothing except inconsistent.
Broader culture definitely plays a role - the Spirit of the Age and all that. Today we see a dramatic growth in atheism, but the arguments they make are at home in the mouth of a Greco-Roman Epicurean and the 'facts' they point to are just as often Victorian or older. The culture just seems to have shifted.
Another example is that the Protestant Reformation was largely a Germanic affair - the North and West Germanic peoples, or people like the Poles or Hungarians or Scots that are heavily influenced or partly derived from them, are where the Protestants came out in strength. Even the Romance Protestants: We see that France and Savoy are prominent, both heavily influenced by Franks and Lombards; in Spain it was centred on Vallodolid before its eradication, in the heartland of the old Visigothic polity, and probably resettled from the Suebic areas. Linguistically, Germanic and Romance languages map roughly Protestant and Catholic, just as Sunni Islam maps Semitic languages. Not that I am arguing for some Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it gives pause. Political boundaries often map beliefs, either because people of the same general belief came to establish or control a Polis, or from outside influence - like Atheism in the eastern bloc or that the Church of the East espoused some Nestorian element, in response to or in opposition, respectively.
These radiate outward from the home, but a rejection of the home is just as possible of an influence. The growth of Hari Krishnas or Buddhism in the West was a symptom of Western Orientalism, a disaffection with the hearth, projecting an idealised not-West onto the Other and identifying with it. The fact that it was so closely entwined with Beetlemania is telling, just as adherence to Communism is. It is the same spirit enmeshing BLM or so today, a rejection of the old order, but necessarily enmeshed and in reaction to it.
That said, the heart also pulls homeward. Humans aren't emotionless drones, and many a 'rational decision' was a product of the constitution or temperament or emotion. Some for instance, ascribed the success of Protestantism to their hymns - as Hillsong has done in our own day. Humans are great at rationalising after the fact, justifying as logical which was perhaps decided irrespective of that.
Besides, Identity is so dizzyingly complex. Apologies for the autobiographical info that follows: I am a home language Afrikaans speaker, and the Afrikaners were traditionally a dour Calvinist bunch that prided themselves on their partial Huguenot roots. I attended a Dutch Reformed Church in my youth, but rapidly descended into Atheism before returning to the faith much later. I flatter myself that this was an intellectual decision, or logical compulsion, but it certainly did not stay there. That said, I have always loved everything Roman and my attachment to Greco-Roman civilisation has been a strong self-ascribed factor. So when I turn to God, I find expressing myself in Afrikaans renders a visceral religion, a religion of doubt and pain requiring Grace. In English, I fall into reasoned ecumenism, in theological quibbling or historical questions. When I open the Vulgate or hear a Latin hymn, the situation again changes and feels more as if the individualism is subsumed into the Body of Christ, driven no doubt by my association of Latin with civilisation and continuance. It reminds me of Charles V saying he spoke Latin to God, Spanish to men, Italian to women and German to his horse. If I can notice this merely from the superficial language change, what aspects am I missing that lie even lower? What subconscious, or even supraliminal, things am I unaware of? What effect has relationships or occupation or so not had?
I doubt very much one is able to at all tease apart factors that underlie a belief, and that reasoning might have been directed a certain way does not necessarily render that belief invalid. A belief is not necessarily false because of the fact that it was reached by inductive ways.
When I became convinced God existed, I tried to eschew the Christian on account of this flawed idea that I was obviously culturally predisposed toward it. The rest just did not stick, whether this is cultural preconditioning or not, the practical matter is that I simply did not believe them. Looking for Christianity, I ended up with CS Lewis an Anglican, Augustine a Church Father, Chesterton a Catholic, Dostoyevsky an Orthodox, etc. In those early days, if the Catholic Church had had a Latin Mass nearby, I am not convinced I wouldn't be Catholic today. But no, I ended up back at the Dutch Reformed Church of my youth, ensconced in its round of familiar hymns and Kerk Bazaar. I find myself chafing at a lot of the old Protestant platitudes, and the waters of the Tiber can lap at your feet. Frankly, I don't know what I believe in-toto, as your beliefs are only really laid bare at the quick, with your feet in the fire. I can unblushingly recite the Apostle's Creed in Afrikaans, English or Latin, but what I mean by it perhaps shades away. I came to the conclusion that I am Protestant, but who knows if this is cognitive bias or not? My self-ascribed identity of Protestant is a shorthand for culture or theology that I may or may not agree with, and the cloak we dress in may be threadbare in places and luxuriant elsewhere, and all these identifying labels are merely the masks we adopt to interact with one another. After all, Person itself merely means Mask, an intellectualising exercise of thinking of yourself, and thus set-up an identity not wholely the same as the Self, that you may aspire to or wish to change or repudiate. No one can escape their biases, and he who thinks he can is a fool who merely hasn't noticed the spectacles he uses to look at the world.
Broader culture definitely plays a role - the Spirit of the Age and all that. Today we see a dramatic growth in atheism, but the arguments they make are at home in the mouth of a Greco-Roman Epicurean and the 'facts' they point to are just as often Victorian or older. The culture just seems to have shifted.
Another example is that the Protestant Reformation was largely a Germanic affair - the North and West Germanic peoples, or people like the Poles or Hungarians or Scots that are heavily influenced or partly derived from them, are where the Protestants came out in strength. Even the Romance Protestants: We see that France and Savoy are prominent, both heavily influenced by Franks and Lombards; in Spain it was centred on Vallodolid before its eradication, in the heartland of the old Visigothic polity, and probably resettled from the Suebic areas. Linguistically, Germanic and Romance languages map roughly Protestant and Catholic, just as Sunni Islam maps Semitic languages. Not that I am arguing for some Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it gives pause. Political boundaries often map beliefs, either because people of the same general belief came to establish or control a Polis, or from outside influence - like Atheism in the eastern bloc or that the Church of the East espoused some Nestorian element, in response to or in opposition, respectively.
These radiate outward from the home, but a rejection of the home is just as possible of an influence. The growth of Hari Krishnas or Buddhism in the West was a symptom of Western Orientalism, a disaffection with the hearth, projecting an idealised not-West onto the Other and identifying with it. The fact that it was so closely entwined with Beetlemania is telling, just as adherence to Communism is. It is the same spirit enmeshing BLM or so today, a rejection of the old order, but necessarily enmeshed and in reaction to it.
That said, the heart also pulls homeward. Humans aren't emotionless drones, and many a 'rational decision' was a product of the constitution or temperament or emotion. Some for instance, ascribed the success of Protestantism to their hymns - as Hillsong has done in our own day. Humans are great at rationalising after the fact, justifying as logical which was perhaps decided irrespective of that.
Besides, Identity is so dizzyingly complex. Apologies for the autobiographical info that follows: I am a home language Afrikaans speaker, and the Afrikaners were traditionally a dour Calvinist bunch that prided themselves on their partial Huguenot roots. I attended a Dutch Reformed Church in my youth, but rapidly descended into Atheism before returning to the faith much later. I flatter myself that this was an intellectual decision, or logical compulsion, but it certainly did not stay there. That said, I have always loved everything Roman and my attachment to Greco-Roman civilisation has been a strong self-ascribed factor. So when I turn to God, I find expressing myself in Afrikaans renders a visceral religion, a religion of doubt and pain requiring Grace. In English, I fall into reasoned ecumenism, in theological quibbling or historical questions. When I open the Vulgate or hear a Latin hymn, the situation again changes and feels more as if the individualism is subsumed into the Body of Christ, driven no doubt by my association of Latin with civilisation and continuance. It reminds me of Charles V saying he spoke Latin to God, Spanish to men, Italian to women and German to his horse. If I can notice this merely from the superficial language change, what aspects am I missing that lie even lower? What subconscious, or even supraliminal, things am I unaware of? What effect has relationships or occupation or so not had?
I doubt very much one is able to at all tease apart factors that underlie a belief, and that reasoning might have been directed a certain way does not necessarily render that belief invalid. A belief is not necessarily false because of the fact that it was reached by inductive ways.
When I became convinced God existed, I tried to eschew the Christian on account of this flawed idea that I was obviously culturally predisposed toward it. The rest just did not stick, whether this is cultural preconditioning or not, the practical matter is that I simply did not believe them. Looking for Christianity, I ended up with CS Lewis an Anglican, Augustine a Church Father, Chesterton a Catholic, Dostoyevsky an Orthodox, etc. In those early days, if the Catholic Church had had a Latin Mass nearby, I am not convinced I wouldn't be Catholic today. But no, I ended up back at the Dutch Reformed Church of my youth, ensconced in its round of familiar hymns and Kerk Bazaar. I find myself chafing at a lot of the old Protestant platitudes, and the waters of the Tiber can lap at your feet. Frankly, I don't know what I believe in-toto, as your beliefs are only really laid bare at the quick, with your feet in the fire. I can unblushingly recite the Apostle's Creed in Afrikaans, English or Latin, but what I mean by it perhaps shades away. I came to the conclusion that I am Protestant, but who knows if this is cognitive bias or not? My self-ascribed identity of Protestant is a shorthand for culture or theology that I may or may not agree with, and the cloak we dress in may be threadbare in places and luxuriant elsewhere, and all these identifying labels are merely the masks we adopt to interact with one another. After all, Person itself merely means Mask, an intellectualising exercise of thinking of yourself, and thus set-up an identity not wholely the same as the Self, that you may aspire to or wish to change or repudiate. No one can escape their biases, and he who thinks he can is a fool who merely hasn't noticed the spectacles he uses to look at the world.
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At age 8 and 9, I had very similar notions about the nature of the Bible (or what little I knew of it at the time) as you did. Of course, I also had a number of notions about sugar-plumbs dancing in my head, along with other, "more interesting" ideas flying-about .......
