2B1

I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”

If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.

Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.

Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.

Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.

Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.

This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:

“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)

The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”

And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)

The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:

Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?

Certainly.

But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)

In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.

Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.

Put to the Test

A story that came out of the Vatican a couple of days ago has left me a bit shocked. I first noticed it in a CNN crawl that said something like, “Vatican approves psychological testing for priest candidates.” A thorough and sober story from the Catholic News Service is headlined Vatican recommends some use of psychological testing in seminaries.

As that story, written by John Thavis, explains, a document released by the Vatican on Oct. 30 says “seminary candidates should undergo psychological evaluations whenever there is a suspicion of personality disturbances or serious doubts about their ability to live a celibate life.” The document, “Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood,” doesn’t sanction routine psychological testing for all seminarians; rather, it says, “the use of psychological consultation and testing [is] appropriate in ‘exceptional cases that present particular difficulties’ in seminary admission and formation,” according to Thavis.

However, during a press conference announcing the policy document, Thavis writes, “Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues, secretary of the congregation, said that, in fact, many dioceses currently have mandatory psychological evaluations for candidates to seminaries.”

Naturally, all of this is linked to the scandal of sexual abuse by priests that has been widely reported over the past several years, and much of the coverage of this week’s announcement has assumed that the new policy is meant to stop homosexuals from being ordained. (“Vatican: Screen for possible gay priests” was the headline on the Seattle Times online story.)

That’s not what I find perplexing. Here’s where I’m having problems:

The word “psychology” is of course Greek in origin and derives from “psyche,” meaning “soul” and “logos,” meaning “word” but also, as I’ve discussed previously, “description,” “explanation,” and so on. So the literal meaning can be taken as “study of the soul.”

As we all know, the Catholic Church has held itself out for almost two millennia as the authority par excellence on the soul and matters pertaining thereto. And it has a long-established “psychology,” largely adapted – through such church fathers as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose and Augustine, and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – from Platonism.

But while the “psychological consultation and testing” now being proposed, and the “mandatory psychological evaluations” already being practiced aren’t specified, it does sound rather like the church is now conceding that the modern materialistic-mechanistic psychiatric/psychological establishment is a better evaluator than it is of men’s souls. (Not women’s, because of course the Vatican still refuses to countenance the ordination of women.)

The Catholic Church has, for about a century now, been relatively accommodating toward science, unlike the more fundamentalist sects that, for example, deny the reality of the evolution of species by natural selection. Some of that may be a result of lingering embarrassment over its despicable treatment of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and so on. But this latest concession may be going too far.

Psychology these days pretty much has discarded the psyche. In fact, many practitioners have dropped that term and prefer to be called behaviorists. The consensus (leaving out Jungians, who are widely derided as “mystical”) seems to be that the mind is nothing but a sort of secretion of the brain, and any abnormal behaviors – the “disorders” that seem so numerous these days – can easily be fixed through chemical modification. So “psychological evaluation” consists basically of seeing which set of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a person matches, and treatment consists of selecting the right medication to “control” it – because no “cure” is possible.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the church shouldn’t do something to prevent pedophiles from becoming priests. I’m just saying there may be better ways to solve this problem. One rather obvious example: Until about the 12th century, priests were allowed to be married and have families; it was only with the reform movement led by Bernard of Clairvaux and others that a monastic-type celibacy was universally prescribed for parish priests. Other religions allow, and even encourage, their clergy to marry, and don’t seem to have such widespread problems with sexual misconduct.

There’s also a very long-standing system of what one might call “vetting” that might be more harmonious with the church’s mission as a spiritual organization. This system was practiced in the Greek philosophical schools and the early Christian monasteries, and it continues to be practiced today in Eastern Orthodox and Buddhist monasticism, and the Sufi schools.

In all these traditions, students or aspirants or candidates for initiation or whatever must undergo a lengthy period of what one might call “spiritual apprenticeship” under the watchful eyes of a community of aspirants who are undertaking the same struggle. The emphasis from the outset is on ethics: the cultivation of virtue and the eradication of vice; only when the school’s leaders are satisfied with the genuineness of the aspirant’s progress is he or she led to the next level of practice.

While there are still some vestiges of this tradition in Catholic monasticism (reflected to a degree in the works of Thomas Merton), the church doesn't especially encourage either its clergy or its laity to undertake this sort of inner conquest of the Self. Instead, like other Christian sects, it turns its energies, and those of its members, toward worldly affairs and outer victories.

Viewed that way, this announcement about psychological testing makes perfect sense: In a world obsessed with appearances, it gives the appearance that the church is doing something decisive about a festering problem. But from another perspective, one might conclude that the church itself is failing a test and paying the price for neglecting its own soul.