metonymy4u

The field of irony is vast and often submerged beneath our everyday existence. Kierkegaard wrote about committment in human affairs as a way of bemoaning the loss of meaning in modern life. For him the most astounding fact of modernity was the loss of interest in irony, which is self creation. Especially in the realm of piety, he saw humanity on a destruction course. In a post Renaissance age when the arts, sciences and philosophy were all flourishing like never before, he nevertheless felt a gnawing hubris at work in the spiritual places. The enlightenment, its infatuation with reason, had purported to sweep away faith in the suprasensible. What was left was a self-conscious irony of art, of music, poetry, and a calculus of moral revolution designed to remove all earthly corruption and cruelty. All reverence for that liberal hope, certainly! But it seems odd that we in the modern world should applaud so easily the long work of the artist who strives to the last to re-describe herself again and again, surpassing all her prior creations, that we would accept art or the social revolutionary, even “personal self discovery” as the tasks of a lifetime, but not accord the same to piety. Nowadays, as Kierkegaard predicted, it seems to me that communal striving towards a suprasensible vision gets subsumed in the watered down sanctimony of “spiritual” or “personal” growth, never to be overspoken or over emphasized, lest someone be offended, or distracted. Now we all must pledge obedience at the altar of self-actualization and seek the blessing of the non-directive, and the politically correct. The problem is that this all too often cedes the field of pious effort to fundamentalist groups and their crusades to rescue various holy lands from contemporary infidels (e.g. the “gays” of California).

When our sense of the pious, of the reverential, of the revealed and the sacred lies forever beneath a public gauze of humiliation and shame, when we are afraid to display our hopes, our dreams, our desires and our vision of the good life, what will we say when the world is made over in another’s image? If we do not send the team out now, to embody a religion of compassion, what rough beast will take the field in our name, bend our will, and slink carelessly toward Bethlehem to be born?