It must be nice to know what the phrase "fully human" means.

You seem to think that those of us for whom religion is at best an object
of anthropological and psychological study can't "take to ourselves the
world we are in, interiorise it," that we're in that sense less "fully
human." Aside from the whiff of the sin of pride, that thought carries
with it a few problems. First, non-believers are a part of the world that
apparently is not taken to themselves by those who think they're less fully
human. Second, it's all too easy to "interiorise " the world. The problem,
it seems to me, is to be able to "exteriorize" it.

But this isn't about thought. Murray Bowen, one of the great theoreticians
of family dynamics, created a simple diagnostic test, that the degree of
sanity, for want of a better word, was a matter of the degree to which one
was able to distinguish between the known and the believed. You can't
"know" that what you believe is so, certainly what you believe about the
relative "humanity" of those around you. You're free to believe whatever
makes you happy. Sanity would require that that set of beliefs be capable
of modification by experience.

Mark


At 01:49 PM 3/9/2004 +0000, Peter Larkin wrote:
>It could be that contemporary faith threads between belief and unbelief
>without simply alternating or opposing, and no overview synthesis either,
>of course. One difference between ourselves and Platonism may be that
>while the latter associated depth or inspiration with an increase in
>ontological grounding and security, we tend to experience the numinous at
>the edges of our experience where fragility seems anything but unrelieved.
> Why I incline more to the belief side rather than disbelief is that I
> came to feel that you can't be fully human without a spirituality (which
> can't be absorbed by the aesthetic), and spirituality needs a culture of
> practice, a cult really. As I happened already to belong to a cult I felt
> there was enough energy in it (often below the surface and yet part of
> its tradition) to stay there. I also came to feel that God is the
> "object" of numinous desire and numinous desire shouldn't simply be
> sucked back into the libidinous as we rather like doing. If the divine is
> the most genuine horizon of the personal, only through God can we be
> worldly, ie really take to ourselves the world we are in, interiorise
> it. Not to say that God isn't distantly, remotely close but I like very
> much Irigaray's idea of "filled" distances, where God is that reserve
> between the couple, between unconsummatable differences but a source of
> attraction in himself. A consummation that itself waits, rests... Sounds
> self-centred but Coleridge was right when he judged that unless you start
> from where the self is you will end with an idol, a construction .
> Not a passive description of explanations but a metanoia, a turning
> within which we are offered an horizon of what we can be for. It makes
> all the difference to me personally, something for one's insecurity to
> do, my bet being that defences are their own best overflow. The prenatal
> has postnatal work to do etc
> By "gift", Alison, I meant something like a breaking down of
> indifference between oneself and the world, so that being part of the
> world means reception and giving on (as a giving onto) - rather different
> from the narrow male sublimities of dissemination indifferent to matters
> of reception and nurture. It sounds a myth too far but it certainly
> doesn't mean rendering the world totally symbolically transparent and
> humanised. It means more encountering the familiar resistence of the
> thinged world to consciousness and emotion as a genuinely spiritual one
> as well.
> Must admit I spend much more time thinking about these things than
> poetry per se. But it doesn't do poetry any harm to be thought round or
> over a bit. This may be the other politics, a reparation of desire..
>Best
>Peter
>
>
>
>Peter Larkin
>Philosophy & Literature Librarian
>University of Warwick Library
>Coventry CV4 7AL
>02476 528151