-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of joanna bujes
> First of all, emotionally satisfying metaphors can govern science as much
as they do religion. If you look at contemporary science, this is not
obvious; but if you look at science that is more and more removed in the
past, it's clearly true. As for religion, what you say is true for organized
religion, which is what most people think any religion is or could be. It is
absolutely not true for say, meditation, which I would argue is the only
genuine religious form/practice. By meditation, I don't mean self-hypnosis,
but a quality of attention that one can exercise at any time. Meditation is
a practice in which one remains completely present, open, and highly
sensitive to everything -- while, not so much suspending judgement, as
allowing it its appropriate place as one more phenomenon to be observed. If
I had my life to live all over again, instead of writing a dissertation
about John Donne, I would write one about the religious movement called the
"devotio moderna" (14 century!?) and argue that it was this
mystical/meditation/practice based movement that actually laid the
metaphysical foundations for modern science. (I think Cassirer partly argues
this too.)
> Of course, the meditation practice I describe above cannot admit priests,
sacred texts, rituals, etc. and thereby is completely unacceptable as a
religion to most. But then many people do not actually aspire to truth or
freedom but to respectability and power. Too bad.
** Certainly by saying that "meditation" is "the only genuine religious form/practice" you are trying to preserve and confining religion within the modern world. This strategy has been articulated best by Talal Asad: "It may be a happy accident that this effort of defining religion converges with the liberal demand in our time that it be kept quite separate from politics, law and sciences - spaces in which varieties of power and reason articulate our distinctly modern life. This definition is at once part of a strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal Christians) of the defence of religion" (Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 28). However I think you are moving beyond this to indicate that religious meditation is *at least* on par with the observational sciences and *at best* a more nuanced and self-aware science. Aside from the attempt to situate religion, in a specific form, as compatible with modernity (a task shared by everyone from Adorno to Zizek) I'm curious as to why you think meditation, of all things, to be religious? Certainly MOST religious tradition do not practice meditation (I wouldn't include shamanic trance as meditation since it has little to do with sustained awareness). Meditation of this sort is almost exclusive to certain (not all) strands of Buddhism as well as some strands of yogic practice. But if we look carefully at the meditation practices we will see things like charming cadavers ("doing")... not the "ideal" of sustained awareness ("belief"). Last point: I'd say that the Black Death had more to do with the advance of science than meditation. According to Samuel Cohn, Jr. (The Black Death Transformed) the plagues of 1347-1352 ushered in the Renaissance because the scientific community, or whatever was left of it, didn't stop trying to explain what was happening in scientific terms... and kept churning out magical cures which they "had faith" in...
Found this:
http://www.etss.edu/hts/MAPM/info3.htm Devotio Moderna ("modern devotion") refers to a movement for the renewal of the spiritual life that began in Holland during the late C14th and was influential in Germany, France, and parts of Italy. Both Catholic and Protestant reform initiatives reflect the influence of theological emphases found in the Devotio Moderna. These include an appeal to the original simplicity of Christian faith in a "golden age" now evidently lost; a call to clergy for a truly holy life; a valuing of the interior life with a corresponding lack of stress on the Church's institutionalized aids to salvation; criticism of formalized acts of piety together with any naive reliance on the external aspects of religion; an insistence that the knowledge of God lay open to scholar and illiterate peasant alike; a soteriological urgency in the face of both human sinfulness and the ubiquitous reality of death; intense and emotional meditation to the suffering of Christ; an interpretation of the Eucharist that stresses the sacrament as mediator of an intimate relationship with Christ. You should be able to spot roots of these features in both Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, and also their influence on Erasmus. The classic text of the movement is St. Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ, but the principal founder of the movement was Geert de Groote (1340-84). Groote - who was never ordained priest - became a missionary preacher in the diocese of Utrecht but had his license withdrawn because of the vehemence of his criticisms of ecclesiastical abuses. The Devotio Moderna was successful amongst laity and found institutional expression in the Brethren of the Common Life: associations of laity and non-monastic priests who were called to practice a disciplined life within their existing callings. The monastic form of the movement was found principally amongst the Windesheim Canons, a community founded in 1387 under the direction of Florentius Radewijns...