A friend and I were talking yesterday about something I call phantasie. That is my word for a lifestyle of illusion, where one's activity and thoughts swim in dreamy reveries and stories, swallowing hours, days, even years if indulged. Phantasie numbs the heart and mind against the real quiddity of the world outside, so that one goes willing into the invisible prison of one's own imagination.
When I think about phantasie, I think about three things.
First, we want phantasie because it distracts us from the void. While it has us, we do not feel meaningless or absurd or bored. We do not fear endings or death because we are waking dreamers whose world is alive with drama and color so long as we remain in the dream.[1] But we sleep in Dorothy's poppies. We sleep unto death, and the cross is our only hope.
Only the cross permits us to look into the void without fear. Only the cross prevents us from the duty to shoulder the heavy angst and absurdity inevitable for the existentialists.[2]
The gospel--and this is the second thing--is a gracious summons to real life, a life peopled with real bodies, an acceptance of our bodies, and a respect for words with real meanings. The gospel calls us to resist phantasie. The living God calls us to love him and to love our neighbor.[2]
The third part of my thinking about phantasie specifically refers to its challenge to the doctrine of revelation. I was raised in traditions that encourage a kind of mystical connection with Jesus through public and private worship, parallelled by an individual and devotional hermeneutic in the case of scripture. It was only when I began reading the Reformers (primarily Martin Luther and John Calvin but also statements such as those in the Book of Concord) that I began to gather the tools to challenge this tradition and to step out onto a path by which the Spirit, rather than speaking in an inner voice to us, has inspired and now illumines/opens our ears to hear the voice of scripture, "he who has ears, let him hear." The tedious ordinaity of reading, of thinking over a historical context, asking grammatical questions, toying with how authors are using words, etc.--the banality of these things becomes the human side of a simultaneously divine relationship.[3]
Phantasie is a prison of feeling that turns our own psychology into a little god whose introspective self-doubt distracts us from the judge and redeemer of the Real. Because it numbs us to reality, it prevents us from owning our relationship to the truth of things--it is an enemy of the truth. Thus, it is sin and bondage. Thus, it is what is being put away in this age, and it will not go into the next.
I struggle with phantasie. It is easy and beautiful and exciting and as available as my phone, TV, or laptop. It is a subtle and private opponent. No one talks about it, and especially as our culture is so obsessed with make believe, but you can spot its victims easily enough: smart, creative people who, for one reason or another, retreat from real life and real human community and relationship into the world of films, TV, books, etc. Don't we know these people well enough? Haven't we been those people on occasion? I've lost years to phantasie. Years of being drugged without realizing one is drugged. And so susceptible am I to its power that I'm shy of such things even today.
Ours is a culture addicted to phantasie, to its amusements, to its escapes. We exist simultaneously as citizens free of its dominion by grace, waiting in hope for our full deliverance into the Real. We daily struggle against it and sometimes give in altogether. For us, confession and repentance is a daily discipline. We must everyday to ask God to help us remember that we are real, our families and communites are real, our neighbors are real, and for them give him our daily gratitude and praise.
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[1] See my post "Blue Longing or Yellow Laziness".)
[2] See my discussion of Emile Cioran.
[3] For where this is positively headed, see my post "A Few Paragraphs on the Doctrine of Vocation."
[4] See my posts "You are Removing God from the Everyday" and "A Response to C.S. Lewis's Lecture 'The Inner Ring'."
This post is so preachy. I can't say it is my favorite. So allow me to qualify one thing: the liberal arts for me are a prime example of the Real. Virtue is living in the Real. Religious ecstasy, where Christianity is concerned, is an opening to things, a seeing of things, as they exist in the light of the resurrection (and I believe in this I am going in the direction of Hans Urs von Balthasar).
ReplyDeletePreach it! Balm for my soul.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for commenting, Wayne. I appreciate your enthusiasm!
ReplyDeleteQ: How does the Real differ from something like the mindfulness of Buddhism's mindfulness of the enlightenment of the yogis?
ReplyDeleteI married a (at the time) Lutheran woman, as you may know. At one point, I flipped through the Book of Concord. My general impression—admittedly without much experience of Lutheranism—was that any Lutheran who genuinely believed everything in the Book should really be a Catholic. (Granted, that likely wouldn't've been true in Luther's day.)
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that. Interesting. There was a lot of sympathy between the Reformers and Orthodoxy, but personalities on both sides got in the way. Also, more to your point, remember that Luther was kicked out of the RCC; he didn't leave of his own accord. There's a fascinating conversation out there with you and Rebecca about what it is like for two ex-Protestants to bring up Orthodox kids. The thing about the Book of Concord is its importance as a distillation of the religious experience--intellectual and otherwise, social and in private--of the scholar-pastors of that period whose lives were literally on the line for every word. That makes bits of it such as the Augsburg Confession not only good theological and devotional reading, but swell historical reading as well.
ReplyDelete"Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is irrelevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra"." from the Wikipedia entry "Simulacra and Simulation," which summarizes philosopher Jean Baudrillard's famous essay about reality and the hyper-real.
ReplyDelete"The Valley-ites were fierce materialists – what couldn’t be measured had no meaning – yet they loathed materiality. In their view, the problems of the world, from inefficiency and inequality to morbidity and mortality, emanated from the world’s physicality, from its embodiment in torpid, inflexible, decaying stuff. The panacea was virtuality – the reinvention and redemption of society in computer code. They would build us a new Eden not from atoms but from bits. All that is solid would melt into their network.
ReplyDelete....
"What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not transcendence but withdrawal. The screen provides a refuge, a mediated world that is more predictable, more tractable, and above all safer than the recalcitrant world of things. We flock to the virtual because the real demands too much of us." ~ Nicholas Carr for Aeon