OPM 117 demonstrates the ecumenicalism that I was introduced to when I was a student of Ewert Cousins at Fordham in the late 1980's. Cousins, with whom I studied Plotinus, Augustine, Bonaventure, Anselm and Dante, was a proponent and practitioner of what he called 'inter religious dialogue.' In this sense, the ecumenicalism Cousins taught was one that was closer to the roots of the word oikoumenikos, from oikoumenē ‘the (inhabited) earth.’ If the initial ecumenical movement was a way to expand the notion of 'Catholic' via interdenominational dialogue (prayer groups), the work Cousins was doing went well beyond the Christian world via the construct of universal spirituality. Indeed, it was Cousins who I recall as first using the term 'spirituality' as a more inclusive and expansive description for the universal human desire for transcendental experience. In fact, the dialogues he staged were more properly 'intra spiritual' because while they were intended to find common ground between religious traditions, the actual practice disclosed the common or shared spiritual domain. Hence the dialogues were both inter and intra: between particular traditions yet at the same time within the universal existential desire for the transcendental.
I was reminded today of those days on Rose Hill, when I met at Crema Cafe in the Portland Old Port with my oldest Fordham comrade, Pete McCormick, who also makes his home in Maine. Talking spirituality v. religion v. philosophy brought me back to the days of sitting on Edward's parade rehearsing and continuing the intense conversations we'd had in class.
Cousins most lasting teaching was his presentation of the mandalas he purchased in Timbuktu, on what he claimed was a marketplace called Mandala Street. He used the mandalas to describe to us the teaching that all spiritual traditions represented distinct paths that, like the spokes on a wheel, were necessary to keep hold the inner and outer together, and, like paths, all lead from different points on the outer to the same place in the center.
OPM 117 is thus not simply one of the meditations that is a microcosm of the entire writing project, but also one that expresses the lasting influence of Cousins on me, which is precisely why it begins by declaring the lover of learning to be devoted to the Tao, and moves on to identify Socrates as an exemplar of this lover, making the connection through Heidegger. Only a deeply ecumenical commitment will offer one the license to understand all first philosophies and first philosophers as part of the same fundamental ground, the oikoumenē shared by all humanity past, present, and future.
And this might also explain why I consistently return back to Socrates' speech from Symposium, when he shares the doctrine of Diotima, the teaching of love, which he identifies as a gift and insists that there is no other that will help humanity. That is, this fragment from the speech, which I return to again and again in these meditations, prompts us to recall that the 'desire' for the transcendental is perhaps the most fundamental or essential desire; that is, pure desire insofar as it expresses the hope and faith we all express in humanity itself, despite its egregious failures.
Cousins most lasting teaching was his presentation of the mandalas he purchased in Timbuktu, on what he claimed was a marketplace called Mandala Street. He used the mandalas to describe to us the teaching that all spiritual traditions represented distinct paths that, like the spokes on a wheel, were necessary to keep hold the inner and outer together, and, like paths, all lead from different points on the outer to the same place in the center.
And this might also explain why I consistently return back to Socrates' speech from Symposium, when he shares the doctrine of Diotima, the teaching of love, which he identifies as a gift and insists that there is no other that will help humanity. That is, this fragment from the speech, which I return to again and again in these meditations, prompts us to recall that the 'desire' for the transcendental is perhaps the most fundamental or essential desire; that is, pure desire insofar as it expresses the hope and faith we all express in humanity itself, despite its egregious failures.
3.0 - (Monday) This past weekend was a roller-coaster ride, and when that happens the daily writing can either feel like a grind or a refuge. But it's been feeling like a refuge because I've have been doing it first thing in the morning, and these early summer days I've been up quite early (it's 5:36am). The sun rises early here in Maine, and the mornings are cool and pleasant. So getting up early seems natural. Folks up here tend to be early to bed early to rise. All that to say that getting going first thing makes a difference. Kind of like a reset from the day before, although this morning I'm quite anxious because it seems the plan to have Jaime attend the alternative HS completely backfired. We should have known better when we felt it best to tell him after the school. Making the decision behind his back was a huge mistake, and upon reflection it seems absurd, and we seem to be acting from within the dialectic, which I was hinting at in yesterday's 3.0 commentary. The dialectic seems to have us and we seem to be made the fools by it. On the one hand, we are trusting his judgment to go off on the SEPTA on his own to neighborhoods in Philly where we've never been to. I even gave him my AMEX so he could get himself food! (That was the motivation for his adventure). So on the one hand we trust him to go off on his own in Philly, but we don't trust him to make his own choice of high school? Actually that's not at all the case. It's not that we don't trust him, it's that we don't trust the school system, at least not the traditional schools. We've had an awful experience with them the past three years of his middle school. His experience has been the opposite of what I describe in my work. He is not being inspired by philosophical educators. And this all unfolded immediately after the 2020 pandemic. So the choice we made was something we believed was for his own good. But this has been our struggle. To guide him. And this is actually an issue that I rarely take up in this project: the reluctant student who refuses to be turned around! Yesterday I was reading from the collected works of Albert Murray, the great essayist, and encountered something so illuminating. In an interview he was asked if he was a romantic. Murray said that he tries to capture the epic hero, which is a figure that transcend time and place is a universal figure of humanity. That way, he said, I'm able to explore the truth of the human experience with all its struggles. The romantic is a sentimentalist, Murray insists. That distinction struck me. And I wondered if the true difference between the original 2004 OPM project and the current book project is captured by this distinction that Murray is getting at. I don't think I would shy away from being labeled a romantic, and I may have described myself as one in this 3.0 commentary. And the figure of the poet-philosopher is not only a romantic one, but my appeal to it is a bit of a romantic gesture.
ReplyDelete3.0b - But as I look above on this page I see the smiling face Ewert Cousins, the embodiment of the romantic, especially if New England Transcendentalism is the American version of romanticism. That's the tradition that Cousins inter-religious dialogue emerges from. The belief that all religions are but spokes on a common wheel, each leading to the same hub that is God. A dialectical approach would emphasize the unity between religions has one that is happening not through God, but through the contrasts between them. A romantic would respond, yes, those are the many faces of God. And the dialectician would respond, so if humanity is created in God's image, then we must embrace the unity of our being multifaceted, having many faces/wearing many masks. The romantic would be challenged to accept that description, because for them there is only one true authentic face, or rather voice, and art is the way it is expressed. And that is essentially the difference where I find myself. The struggle between trying desperately to find that one true authentic voice versus finding the one authentic way of being, which could come forth through one voice or through multiple voices. If this past weekend demonstrated anything, it is that the search for the one true authentic voice is indeed a sentimentalist dream that only leads to disappointment, or even tragedy.
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