01/12/2022 – Effing the Ineffable?

Effing the ineffable? What is that? How do we drive the limits of language to say what ultimately matters? I seem to be stuck on a religious language theme philosophically. Maybe I’m stuck in a causal time loop or something. This is TenOnReligion.

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Wesley Wildman is from Boston University and today we’re going to talk about his 2018 book, Effing the Ineffable. If you haven’t heard the word “ineffable” before, it means something that is beyond our grasp of fully understanding. This word is used a lot in the academic field of religion, especially in religious philosophy. This book lays out nine ways, in three groups of three, of how people have tried to understand and interpret religion, thus “effing the ineffable.” Understanding religion has been termed as “ultimacy” at least far back as Paul Tillich’s heyday in the 1950’s, so the three groups Wildman has chosen to categorize these ideas are Ultimacy Talk, Ultimacy Systems, and Ultimacy Manifestations. He has also somehow managed to label each way of effing the ineffable with a single-word title, which is a catchy way to talk about this, but I’ll let you decide whether or not this one-word trick thing works.

The first group of Ultimacy talk contains Dreaming, Suffering, and Creating. In Dreaming the idea is that highly anthropomorphic ideas of ultimate reality, ideas or models of God that are like too human-like, aren’t really the best models. If there is supernatural revelation at all, then behind the models are temporally bound, culturally conditioned, and linguistically limited forms of thought. So, one should not just list models of ultimate reality but try to discern criteria for evaluation so the possibility of comparing models can occur. But since creating criteria is not a neutral activity either, people will argue for comparative criteria which shows their model in the best light. There quickly emerges a contrast between useful beliefs (such as those inspiring for human life and those that help coping with death) and accurate or true beliefs, which is precisely why creating evaluating criteria is so important.

In Suffering, Wildman describes three models of God, partially drawn from his book In Our Own Image, published the year before this book in 2017. I haven’t read this book yet, but I’m looking forward to it in the next month or so with possibly a third Wildman episode on this channel coming in the near future. These models of God are agential-being theism, process theism, and ground-of-being theism. The question is, how can highly anthropomorphic understandings of God express suffering? If divine intentions are always good, then is suffering some sort of by-product? Is it fundamental, or some kind of illusion? Suffering drives us to try to understand religiously if everything will be right in the end. Does that make suffering a good or bad thing?

Then the last chapter in Ultimacy talk is Creating. Can we get to the bottom of all this talk about ultimacy? I mean, is it even possible? The yes and no answers to that question have two answers on each side, roughly speaking, a positive and negative response. If we can get the bottom of all this talk about ultimacy, on the positive side are ground-of-being options like Bob Neville. On the negative side, we can get to the bottom of all this and, guess what, there’s nothing there. That’s Nietzsche or Albert Camus, for example. If we can’t get to the bottom of all this, on the positive side is mysticism, or sometimes called apophaticism. We’re on a journey but we never quite get there. On the negative side is agnosticism, basically we can’t know.

Part two of this book is Ultimacy Systems and contains Slipping, Balancing, and Eclipsing. This was easily my favorite of the three sections of the book. Your mileage may vary though. Slipping starts out by citing examples from historical religious narratives about a slip, or near-accidental mistake of apparent unimportance at the time, but resulting in tragic or far-reaching consequences. (Which happens a lot in ancient Greek literature, by the way. They were morbidly fascinated by this thematic literary practice.) This slip relates to either the sensitivity or insensitivity to what Wildman labels the “underside of life.” On the one side, societies cannot afford to let empathy become too pronounced because the underside of life is too painful. We don’t want to see ourselves as the victim because it hurts, so we create another object to blame such as the devil, a class of people, a race and so on. If we have too much empathy that leads to violence against the false victim that we’ve created. On the other side, modern societies cannot afford to let insensitivity become too pronounced. The horrible expressions of suffering and exploitation typically have a socioeconomic and often a racial or colonial or class-hierarchical slant to them, and too much insensitivity amplifies tensions to the point of forcing revolutionary impulses into the open, or we just end up not caring at all and become entirely passive. So, if these historical religious narratives are so vague with directly identifying the problem, then our interpretations end up all over the place either blaming falsely identified victims or doing nothing to solve the issues.

The second part of Ultimacy Systems is Balancing, which has to do with symbolic or metaphorical religious references, which are most of them. Some of these are personal models and some are impersonal. The problem is, except for a few people who are trained in religious philosophy and language, most folks don’t fully grasp the historical construction of such symbols and metaphors with which they engage through their various traditions. Wildman offers four strategies for balancing these personal and impersonal metaphors: perspective, paradox, subordination, and integration. There are the two main forms of anxiety that motivate these balancing strategies: anxiety about truth and anxiety about the how effective these are as symbols for God. But we do not yet have any method to evaluate the practical effectiveness of such balancing strategies. It’s unclear if any of the four have any advantage over the others and Wildman goes on to explain why this is the case.

Then, the third part of Ultimacy Systems is my favorite chapter, Eclipsing. This whole chapter is about liberal theology which “eclipses” the very ultimate reality it intends to describe. Liberal theology is correct both in what it criticizes and its deconstruction of mythological beliefs and subsequent interpretation of symbolism in religion, but it often lacks the moral clarity needed to finish the job. You see, most liberal theologians have been better at naming and theorizing the problem than at articulating the constructive alternative that liberal theology represents. What is really needed, however, is the theory of religious symbols that can explain how religious symbols succeed in effectively and truly and authentically engaging people with ultimacy even when the person wielding them does so without being aware of their myth-laden character. Wildman says liberal theologians are, in general, quite nice people, and they don’t like offending anyone or hurting feelings. And that is what following through would do. It would hurt. It’s hard work convincing religious adherents that their closely-held religious referents are but symbols, and even if that can be accomplished, what next? Such religious referents are what hold the communities together in the first place. They’re simple to understand from a young age whereby the symbolic understanding of religion is hard to grasp, even for a lot of adults. Even if people can sense that something is incoherent in a religious narrative with remarkable accuracy, though they can’t say precisely what it is, perhaps myth-laden beliefs and practices are better for sustaining religious communities. It doesn’t matter if those beliefs are less true than what results when those beliefs are processed through the sophisticated hermeneutics of liberal theology. It’s just too difficult to institutionalize on a large scale. If religion gets explained, does it get explained away?

Finally, part three, Ultimacy Manifestations, which contains Loneliness, Intensity, and Bliss. These chapters were more indirect manifestations of ultimacy, and I feel like I didn’t completely get the connection to religion in all of them, but I’m sure plenty of other people would. In Loneliness, after relaying a nutshell version of the ancient story about Gilgamesh, Wildman talks about the nature and ground of loneliness. The status of an interpretation of human loneliness refers to whether loneliness is regarded as essential or incidental to human nature. If essential, then loneliness belongs to the proper natural character of human being, and the question of its cultivation as a virtue can be raised. If incidental, then loneliness is merely an inessential by-product of the stresses and frustrations of human life, one that in principle can be overcome. The conclusion is that loneliness and love are co-primal in the constitution of human being. There are no good reasons or arguments for breaking the symmetry between loneliness and love.

The chapter on Intensity focuses on how language struggles to describe such experiences. Sometimes we want to be silent, sometimes we want to speak and can’t stop, and sometimes we want to move our bodies in some form of ritualized way. The connection is from intense experiences to intensity, and then intensity as manifestation and revelation from which ultimacy is inferred. There’s more going on in this chapter, but again, I didn’t feel like I got all of it.

The final chapter in Ultimacy Manifestations is Bliss. A very personal example was given regarding pain-driven empathic despair, and once one survives tremendous pain, one sees bliss in a new way. This is going to be hard to get, but he then talks about the emotional multivalence, cognitive ineffability, and moral inassimilability of bliss. This is basically untamed, wild bliss. Bliss untamed is the power source for the deconstruction of our social worlds, and sacred canopies or religious worldviews work much better when we don’t understand the magic behind the scenes. (Anyone ever watch The Wizard of Oz?) Therefore, social stability requires both the taming of bliss and the control of individuals who encounter bliss so forcefully that the social construction of reality becomes transparent for them. Examples include the death of Socrates or the crucifixion of Jesus, as extreme cases, and the marginalization of disruptive individuals, more generally. That’s an interesting idea. On the last page of this chapter, he writes that there can be authentic engagement with ultimate reality under misleading symbolic descriptions of its character. But enlightenment arises only where reality is taken for what it is. Now that sounds religious!

So, what do you think about his ways of categorizing how various groups have tried to interpret religion and thus “eff the ineffable?” Do the one-word chapter titles work for you or could this have been reworked in a different way? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.