Words, Letters, Myth, Zen, Stuff

On his blog, Andrew Sullivan shares a reader letter about language and religion, in this case Christian. The reader writes,

Very early on it struck me that the crisis of faith in my own experience was a crisis of language that obfuscated spiritual reality. It seemed that the mystical traditions of both Catholicism, certain forms of Buddhism and Islam had struggled mightily to push the limits of what we could speak of in terms of God and our experience of God. I think the post-modern hermeneutical tradition had much to say on this with respect to language in general.

For those of you who (like me) react to academic-y phrases like post-modern hermeneutical tradition by wanting to rip them out of the sentence and stomp on them -- hermeneutics is the study of how texts are interpreted. This is not the interpretation itself, mind you, but how people arrive at interpretations. You're on your own regarding post-modern hermeneutics, sorry. But I do want to point out that hereneutics is sorta kinda related to epistemology, which is the study of how we know what we think we know.

It's useful to understand both language and knowledge as dynamic things that are joint collaborations of individuals, societies, cultures, and phenomena. The ways in which we think, learn, know, and interpret are in large part stamped into us by the culture we are born into. Most of us arrive at adulthood with well-defined grooves in our heads that channel our thinking, learning, knowing, and interpreting into established patterns.

This is efficient, but it is also limiting. It is extremely difficult to get out of those groves and think, learn, know, and interpret in entirely different ways. It can be difficult even to imagine there are different ways of "knowing. " (Not all "knowing" is knowledge, of course.) Since the grooves in our heads are largely put their by our cultures, people of the same culture tend to share similar groove patterns.

Language, and how we understand language, is like this also. Among scholars and academics there is a hypothesis -- not universally accepted -- that language affects how we perceive. I think that's true to the extent we confuse what we label a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself.

Anyway -- regarding religion, if you read the entire letter posted by Sullivan (it's short), he seems to be saying that the way people talk these days about religion, the language and vocabulary, has become a barrier to direct religious experience. Put another way, language as we know it is an inadequate vessel to convey the most profound truths of religion.

Now, regarding the "certain forms of Buddhism" -- Zen has approached the language problem by using language in a different way. Zen teacher Robert Aitken wrote in The Gateless Barrier (North Point Press, 1991, pp. 48-49):

"The presentational mode of communication is very important in Zen Buddhist teaching. This mode can be clarified by Susanne Langer's landmark book on symbolic logic called Philosophy in a New Key. She distinguishes between two kinds of language: 'Presentational' and 'Discursive.' The presentational might be in words, but it might also be a laugh, a cry, a blow, or any other kind of communicative action. It is poetical and nonexplanatory -- the expression of Zen. The discursive, by contrast, is prosaic and explanatory. ... The discursive has a place in a Zen discourse like this one, but it tends to dilute direct teaching."

Put another way, Zen long has used language in a way that doesn't rest on what words and phrases mean as much as on what words and phrases evoke. Presentational language is used to present reality rather than explain reality. This is a tricky thing to get used to, which is why many of the conversations recorded in koan collections make no sense. Those who try to interpret the conversations as discursive prose, so that they make sense, invariably end up light years away from how the koans are understand within the Zen tradition.

It's important to understand also that what is conveyed or evoked is realization, not just vague sentiment or "feelings." It's a profound shift in perception; seeing with a whole new set of eyeballs. I find that a lot of people don't "get" that.

Anyway, what I could find of Susanne Langer (1895-1985) through a quickie web expedition brought the late Joseph Campbell to mind, so I googled "Susanne Langer Joseph Campbell" and came across a blog post written today titled "Shobogenzo & the Tao of Mythical Expression" by Zen student Ted Biringer. I recommend the entire blog post for those of you who are "into" Dogen.

But a main point is that the language of religion is largely the language of myth, which Campbell dedicated his life to exploring. Now, I'm not quite sure that Zen's style of presentational language is exactly the same thing as the language of myth as described by Campbell, but I can certainly see a resemblance. There's also a connection to what Karen Armstrong so often writes about, that the way people in the West understood the Bible and other scriptures -- the hermeneutical tradition, if you will -- changed profoundly during the "Age of Reason."

Armstrong said in an interview,

Well, you must realize that our words and thoughts can't measure up to what we call God. Music is a very rational form of art. It's related intimately to mathematics and yet it's not about anything you can say with words. You can't say what a Beethoven quartet means. And yet it is telling you something beyond words. It touches you. It lifts you beyond yourself. You're reduced to silence and theology should be like that. What happened in the West, in the 16th and 17th centuries, is that theology started to answer its own questions and started to be too talkative and thinking its words actually measured up to the reality we call God....

... Look at Christianity -- it's a perfectly good religion. But the way many people understand it today, doctrine is absolutely essential. So we talk about religious people as believers, as though accepting propositions of a creed were the main thing. Our word for belief has changed its meaning. It used to mean to love, to commit yourself, to involve yourself. It only started to mean a set of doctrines in the late 17th century.

It's interesting to note that the idea that the stories in the Bible must be literally and factually true, an idea embraced today by conservative Christians, didn't become widespread until the latter part of the 19th century.

Taking us back to Sullivan's reader -- he seems to have tried to find his own way back to whatever hermeneutical tradition was abandoned by Christianity generations ago. "Sadly, on a personal note, the struggle left me personally and spiritually bankrupt," he wrote. "Far from finding anything at the end of language, I simply found profound silence."

That's because you can't get there without a guide. Mysticism, which is what we're talking about, requires parameters, guidance, practice. That's what Thomas Merton understood, I think, and why he was so keen to study the mystical practices of Buddhism as a means to reconstruct the lost mystical traditions of Christianity. It's a shame Merton died so soon in his quest.

So while I agree with the writer that Christianity suffers a "crisis of language," what's beneath the crisis of language is a crisis of practice. When religion is primarily a belief system that one must accept without question, it is no longer a path to anything resembling epiphany or realization or enlightenment or whatever you want to call it. I suspect that's the thing the fellow who wrote the letter is missing -- a path; a way to break out of the grooves in one's head. A way to go beyond the words.