Читать книгу The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul - Eric McLuhan - Страница 8

“Anyone wishing to follow reason alone would be a confirmed lunatic in the opinion of the greater part of the world” (Pascal). Anyone wishing to follow faith alone is liable to be a confirmed heretic for many people—so little do the standards of judgment of many men, seemingly the most jealous of orthodoxy, partake of the order of faith.

Anyone wishing, in what concerns faith, to be guided by faith alone, must in any case be prepared to walk alone.

But his solitude is only apparent. It is a solitude filled with invisible presences. It is the painful condition of the deepest and purest communion.

--Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith

Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit,² that is, a kind of revelation. St. Thomas wrote, “Faith must needs be from God. Because those things which are of faith surpass human reason, hence they do not come to man’s knowledge, unless God reveal them. To some, indeed, they are revealed by God immediately, as those things which were revealed to the apostles and prophets...”³ Faith, then, provides knowledge.

The starting point of Christian experience is faith. Faith is not replaced by experience, but it remains the comprehensive form of Christian experience. This is the first point to be made about Christian experience, as Wojtyla understands it: its origin and measure lies in faith, not the other way around. Faith must be “enriched,” that is, it must become more mature and conscious, able to form the whole of experience. “Faith and the enrichment of faith is a supernatural gift from God and is not subject to human planning or causation; but man, and the church as a human community, can and must cooperate with the grace of faith and contribute to its enrichment.^{4, 5}

I have always understood faith to be “a way of knowing”: another sense, not one of touch & co., but nonetheless one by which you simply know certain things, analogous to how you know that something is coarse or smooth, or loud, or bright, or sweet, or stinks.

Faith, then, is NOT opinion, and it is not belief (in the common, loose sense), though we often use these terms casually to refer to it. Belief and opinion are things we decide to have. “Believe” can mean several things. At one end of the spectrum there is “I believe that it will rain tomorrow” and also “I believe that astronauts did land on the moon, and that nobody faked the whole thing in the Arizona desert” at the other end there is the “believe” in “Credo in unum deum, patrem omnipotentem...” which is decidedly close to the idea of faith, if not synonymous with it. Still, faith is not a decision but a knowing, a kind of perception and knowledge given to or through the soul; it uses the soul as a sense modality, a medium of communication. “Only faith enables us to experience the salvific presence of God in Christ in the very center of life and of history. Faith alone reveals to us the meaning of the human condition and our supreme dignity as sons and daughters of God who are called to communion with Him.”⁶ Faith is supernatural, experiential knowing of supernatural matters.

St. Paul wrote that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unknown” (Hebrews 11:1). St. Paul was not waxing metaphorical here: he meant these statements to be taken at face value. A substance does not consist of opinion or belief: you can experience it. Equally with evidences: you may have opinions about them, and you may express belief or incredulity or doubt about them, as with any experience, but neither belief nor opinion is faith. They aren’t knowledge.

So faith is unmediated (that is, it circumvents the bodily senses), direct knowledge of things spiritual. Anagogical knowledge.

Henri de Lubac approaches the matter circuitously:

The divinity of the Word of God incarnate is in fact the central object of allegory. It is revealed, however, only to the “eyes of the heart,” to those “inner eyes,” those “spiritual eyes, those “eyes of the soul,” those “better eyes,” that are opposed to the eyes of the flesh and which are in reality the eyes received from God, the eyes “illuminated by the Gospel” or, following a frequent expression, the “eyes of the faith.” For faith has her own eyes. Faith is the light “that makes one see the light of the spirit in the law of the letter”; it is like a lamp lit in the night, penetrating the thick cloud of all the biblical “sacraments” which surround it. We are therefore to be imbued in the faith through allegory. The truths of the allegory, “mysteries of Christ and the Church,” are the “mysteries of the faith” hidden in the ceremonies of the Law.” They are the “sacraments of our faith.”⁷

De Lubac points out that allegory is the doctrinal sense par excellence, and observes (p. 109), “One can therefore define the Christian faith as ‘allegorica doctrina.’ In fact, "what is allegory but the mystic doctrine of the mysteries?"⁸ Its content is exactly "the doctrine of the holy Church.”⁹ And he adds, “This relation of the faith to allegory, as always when it is a question of effecting passage to a higher order, can be understood only as a relation of reciprocal causality.”¹⁰ A few lines later, he reiterates:

But in reality, let us say it again, there is essentially no point to look for any priority of allegory received by relation to faith nor of faith received by relation to the perception of allegory: each mutually conditions the other. It is one and the same indivisible act the elements and logical instants of which later theology will analyze that gives access to the one and to the other under the action of the Spirit of christ.¹¹

For centuries, the various senses of Scripture were grouped as the literal (or historical) sense and the allegorical sense. Gradually, the latter term came to refer to an allegorical understanding of the literal sense, and the word “tropology” came to refer to two senses distinct from the allegorical sense, the moral and anagogical senses.

No more than allegoria for the second sense was the word tropologia imposed here. In the most general acceptation, a trope was a figure, a mode, or a turn of phrase (Greek, tropos, Latin conversio),by which one turns some expression to designate some object other than the one naturally meant.¹² Tropologia, accordingly, was a speech turned around or “turning” something else “around”; it was a “turned” or “turning” manner of speech. There was nothing in it that might suggest an idea of moral conversion any more than there was in allegoria anything that would suggest the mystery of christ. Thus we understand that, within the nascent vocabulary of exegesis, “tropology” at first had been practically synonymous with allegory, as well as with anagogy. The process that little by little needed to distinguish and specialize these three words was almost entirely contingent. Allegoria was found to have a right of priority, chiefly because of Saint Paul; it therefore designated, prior to every other distinction, the collection of senses added to historia, then, more precisely, the first among them, which in a certain fashion stood at the head of the other two. Anagogy belonged naturally enough to the fourth. All that remained for tropology, then, was the third place; it took it and kept it. It was even more natural that the only figured sense, already designated by this word, would, among the pre-Christian exegetes of the Bible, be found practically to be the moral sense. Then it would be explained as being “a speech turned around toward us, i.e., toward our ways of behaving,” or “a speech turning around, pertaining to the mind’s ways of behaving.”¹³

The literal sense of Scripture, also called the historical sense, “contains” all of the other senses inasmuch as, without the letters (litterae), there is no Scripture at all, just blank sheets of paper. But that is not the intended meaning of the term. “Literal” refers, first of all, to the written littera, the letter¹⁴ on the page. Letters, words, sentences present the historical narrative: the narrative contains three other senses of Scripture and is the sine qua non of Scripture and interpretation. I would prefer to separate the terms “literal” and “historical” rather than continue to use them interchangeably.

But to return: Littera gesta docet, runs the old verse. The next line positions the role of allegory: Quid credas allegoria. Then comes the tropological turn:

Littera gesta docet,

Quid credas allegoria;

Moralis quid agas,

Quo tendis anagogia.

The first two senses, literal/historical and allegorical, are outward, objective senses; the remaining two are interior, mystical senses. Comments de Lubac:

[Tropology] occupies the third place in the most frequent and the most logical formulation ofthe four senses and which even those who make no distinct mention of it did not miss relates to the spiritual sense proper to Scripture, not only in fact but also by necessity. It contributes to the elaboration of this sense which characterizes Scripture only. It does not precede “the spiritual edifice,” but it “adds to it,” or rather it exerts itself within it to complete it. It is within allegory. It constitutes an integral part of the mystery. Coming after the objective aspect of which it is the allegory, it constitutes its subjective aspect. It is, if one can say so, its intussusception, its interiorization; it appropriates it for us. Tropology draws its exempla from this mysterium. It is this “mystic sense of morality,” the letter¹⁵ this “understanding of spiritual life,” that a practiced eye detects everywhere in the two Testaments. If allegory, starting from the facts of history, envisions the mystical body in its head or in its totality, tropology envisions it in each of its members.¹⁶

“Everything,” de Lubac points out, “is consummated in the inner man.” He insists over and over that the interiorized experience of the Scriptures is not illusion but real experience, experience minus the bodily senses, that is, unmediated by the body; thus it is direct experience, which is also mystical experience, direct contact. How this is achieved remains to be seen, infra. “No more,” he insists, is it

A question of gratifying oneself intellectually in a knowledge of the mysteries of allegory that would remain completely objective, leaving the heart unchanged. This would be an illusory knowledge; for in these sorts of things understanding comprehends nothing if experience is absent:¹⁷ the mystery interiorizes itself within the heart, where it becomes experience¹⁸–though always passing over in itself “the limits of experience” as well as those of reason. The “virtus mysteriorum,” their proper energy, acts within the one who contemplates them in faith.¹⁹

The moral sense and the anagogic sense are in continuity with each other; the object they aim at is of the same structure:²⁰ anagogy is the extension of mystical tropology.²¹ Garnier of Rochefort, a disciple of both Origen and of Dionysus, as well as of St. Gregory and of John Scotus, describes anagogy in terms that are at the same time a description of ecstasy:

...Climbing to the heights by the steps of sure contemplation, the human mind also contemplates anagogically the heavenly secrets by the holy gaze of divine eloquence; and thus starting from two kinds of visions it ascends to all the perfection that had been infused in the minds of theologians and prophets through the grace of divine revelation; in Greek they call this (first) kind of revelation theophanies, i.e., divine manifestations; the other, whereby it strives to contemplate the most heavenly one as he is by the mind’s climbing up and going out in nakedness and purity and without covering,²² is the kind that is called anagogic.

But in this last kind of vision the human so trembles and shudders that, dizzied by the darkness of its own ignorance, it cannot go forth toward that brightness and glow of truth unless it be directed; but, as it were, blind and guided by hand, it advances whither it does not see and begins to be melted through the vision and the visitation of the Beloved, so that it neither conceives what it ought or wants to about God nor is able to utter what it conceives, when it strives to investigate that bit of the heavenly kingdom beyond still surrounded by veils and the yet uncircumscribed dimension of the divine glow, and, though still investigating, fails. Thunderstruck, the mind clings fast in contemplation; it becomes numb with agitation; speaking, it is rendered utterly silent; and the copiousness that poverty had made copious returns the poverty; in advancing it falls short in wondrous way, and then advances the more once it has reached its shortfall.²³

De Lubac comments on the unity of the fourfold senses:

It is in traditional eschatology that the doctrine of the four senses is achieved and finds its unity. For Christianity is a fulfillment, but in this very fulfillment it is a promised hope. Mystical or doctrinal, taught or lived, true anagogy is therefore always eschatological. It stirs up the desire for eternity in us. This is also why the fourth sense is forced to be the last. No more than it could really lack the three others could it be followed by a fifth. neither is hope ever lacking nor, in our earthly condition, is it ever surpassed even if it already encroaches upon its term.²⁴

The exterior historical sense contains the other senses inasmuch as without the narrative there is nothing; the anagogic and tropological senses contain the others in an organic unity of interiorized experience. Together they are the sensus communis of the intellectual human soul. And that interiorized experience is characterized by incompleteness; it needs, it demands, human participation to complete it:

Mysterium Christi. Only this unique mystery possesses infinite depths, and the mind of each of the faithful has varying capacities for comprehending it. From this there results for every spiritual understanding, as we have seen more especially for anagogy, an incurable character of incompleteness. But, as the Gregorian term volatus for anagogy has already indicated, this fatal incompleteness is to be considered above all in its positive and dynamic aspect. The Word of God does not cease to create and to hollow out within the one who readies himself for it the capacity to receive it, with the result that the faithful understanding can increase indefinitely. By allegory the old text can always let more novelty shine through;²⁵ the new mystery can always be more interiorized and introduce eternity more deeply into the heart.²⁶

The poet Ezra Pound charmingly characterizes the process of meaning as “the dance of the intellect among the words.” The mysterious accomplishment of that mystical interiorization and completion comes about via the sensus communis of the body and has been practiced for millennia by the poets. The common sense that Aquinas discusses, the sensus communis, is itself an interior sense, the interior aspect of the sense of touch, of which all of the other bodily senses are extensions or articulations.²⁷ The common sense is as it were the etymology of each and every one of the exterior bodily senses, just as anagogy is as it were the etymology of each and every one of the other Scriptural senses. St. Thomas makes the same observation: “The interior sense is called ‘common’ not by predication, as if it were a genus; but as the common root and principle of the exterior senses.”²⁸

That is, the common sense is the “place” where the exterior (“proper”) senses meet: it is identical with touch, for us the enveloping sense, the environment of the whole body.

The proper sense judges of the proper sensible by discerning it from other things which come under the same sense; for instance by discerning white from black or green. But neither sight nor taste can discern white from sweet: because what discerns between two things must know both. Wherefore the discerning judgment must be assigned to the common sense; to which, as to a common term, all apprehensions of the senses must be referred: and by which, again, all the intentions of the senses are perceived; as when someone sees that he sees. For this cannot be done by the proper sense, which only knows the form of the sensible by which it is immuted, in which immutation the action of sight is completed and from which immutation follows another in the common sense which perceives the act of vision.²⁹

Touch, then, as all of the bodily senses at once, is the locus of what we call synesthesia;³⁰ equally, anagogy is the locus of intellectual synesthesia, the scriptural sense that is home to, and that consists of, all of the senses of Scripture taken together. Ergo, just as the bodily senses are particulars of the common sense of touch, so the other scriptural senses are particulars of the anagogical sense. The home of both modes of synesthesia is of course the human soul, that which animates the body and makes it human. There, the two modes of synesthesia are in active interface, active interchange.

Gilson argues that “there are not two conceivable solutions of the problem of knowledge, one for the [physical] senses, another for the intelligence”:

Sensible knowledge and intellectual knowledge can be, and indeed are, two different species or two different steps of the same kind of operation, so they rest inevitably upon a single explanation. If it were necessary to introduce an ideal cleavage in universal order, it would fall between the animal and the plant, not between the animal and man. Restrained as is its field of operation, the animal is still increased by the being of others through the sensation it experiences. It is, therefore, sharply, though still incompletely, disengaged from pure materiality.³¹ Hence we have to explain cognitive operations in such a way that we can attach both intelligence and sensation to the same principle and judge them by the same rules.³²

We have five exterior senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell; they are articulations of / divisions of tactility, the common sense.

Five is the number for expression, for the exterior world. The science of rhetoric has five divisions. Words are modes of experience,³³ and are themselves experiences; a language is an organ of perception (poetic knowledge).

Aquinas equates the common sense with the soul,³⁴ the “common” sense, meaning all of the senses at once. I now take this understanding to apply to the four inward senses: together they form a complementary kind of common sense.

It is essential to bear in mind that there are not two human souls, one inward and one outward, but one human soul with twin sensitivities. St. Thomas deals with this and the related matters in the Summa Theologica as follows:

According to the Philosopher, Metaphysics viii (Did. vii. 2), difference is derived from the form. But the difference which constitutes man is rational,which is applied to man on account of his intellectual principle. Therefore the intellectual principle is the form of man.³⁵