Peter Lawler toasts Flannery O'Connor's birthday at NLT. In a gesture of my own, this quote, captured by Christopher Lasch in his Revolt of the Elites (purchase link in the Phrontesterion), strikes a permanent chord:
there are long periods in the lives of all of us ... when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints.
There is a curious dynamic here. Typically acolytes of Doubt as the basis of not just faith but all knowledge conceive of inherited law as that to which doubt is to be applied. But tradition is the overlapping consensus of inherited law and inherited faith. This is different again from inherited reason and inherited wisdom. What interests me is the notion that recourse to inherited law as a depository of truth can steady the soul wracked by the truth revealed by faith, which sometimes looks so alarmingly similar to the truth revealed by unfaith. What is repulsive is that the hideous exists, that it cannot be eradicated. The logic of therapeutics offers the leveraged buyout of the hideous. In this regard it might actually be opposed to true doubt, the difference between the feeling behind a shrug and behind stopping on the street in one's tracks.
In between is the tension of tradition. MacIntyre is relentless in calling Burke a fool for romanticizing ignorant habit. But Burke is certainly right that people at least do maintain traditions in ignorance, in the same sense that what is authoritative is often what is unselfconsciously (so doubly) taken for granted. How to be less self-conscious is the final integration to be performed by the therapeutic: can it ever do it without recourse to the psychiatric materialism of mind-altering and mood-altering drugs? And even then the hideous will not disappear for good. One reason why we would be, as Lawler likes to say, "stuck with virtue" is that we are stuck with the Horror, and there is no other way to keep it at bay while permitting ourselves (meaning, also, our posterity) with a grace of unselfconsciousness. Is the virtue of virtue innocence?
Comments