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COMMENTARY
October 24 , 2017 | The Valley Catholic
Moral Theology : Language as Opening or Closing our Minds
By Rev . Ron Rolheiser , OMI
Theologian , teacher , award-winning author , and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio , TX
Thirty years ago , the American Educator , Allan Bloom , wrote a book entitled , “ The Closing of the American Mind .” This was his thesis : In our secularized world today our language is becoming ever-more empirical , one-dimensional , and devoid of depth and this is closing our minds by stripping us of the deeper meanings inside our own experience . For Bloom , how we name an experience determines to a large extent its meaning .
Twenty years earlier , in rather provocative essay , “ The Triumph of the Therapeutic ,” Philip Rieff had already suggested something similar . For Rieff , we live our lives under a certain “ symbolic hedge ,” namely , a language and set of symbols within which we interpret our experience . And that hedge can be high or low and consequently so too will be the meaning we derive from any experience . Experience can be rich or shallow , depending on the language by which we interpret it .
Take this example : A man has a backache and sees his doctor . The doctor tells him that he ’ s suffering from arthritis . This brings the man some initial calm . But he isn ’ t satisfied and sees a psychologist . The psychologist tells him that his symptoms are not just physical but that he is also suffering from mid-life crisis . This names his pain at a deeper level and affords him a richer understanding of what he is undergoing . But he ’ s still dissatisfied and sees a spiritual director . The spiritual director , while not denying him arthritis and mid-life crisis , tells him that he should understand this pain as his Gethsemane , as his cross to carry .
Notice all three diagnoses speak of the same pain but that each places that pain under a different symbolic hedge . Language speaks at different levels and only a certain language speaks at the level of the soul . Recently we have been helped to understand this through the work of Carl Jung and a number of his disciples , notably James Hillman and Thomas Moore , who have helped us to understand more explicitly the language of the soul and how that language uncovers deep archetypes within us .
We are losing the language of the soul and we are poorer for it .
We see the language of soul , among other places , in some of our great myths and fairy tales , many of them centuries old . Their seeming simplicity can fool you . They may be simple , but they ’ re not simplistic . To offer one example , the story of Cinderella : The first thing to notice in this story is that the name , Cinderella , is not a real name but a composite of two words : Cinder , meaning ashes ; and Puella , meaning the eternal girl . This is not a simple fairy tale about a lonely , beaten-down young girl . It ’ s a myth that highlights a deep structure within the human soul , namely , that before our souls are ready to wear the glass slipper , be the belle of the ball , to marry the prince , and to live happily ever after we must first spend some necessary time sitting in the ashes , suffering humiliation , and being purified by a time in the dust .
Notice how this story speaks in its own way of our spirituality of “ lent ,” a season of penance , wherein we mark ourselves with ashes in order to enter a desert of our own making .
Cinderella is a story that shines a tiny light into the depth of our souls . Many of our famous myths do that , though nothing shines a light into the soul as deeply as does Scripture , the Bible . Its language and symbols name our experience in a way that both honors the soul and helps us plumb the genuine depth inside our experiences .
For example : We can be confused , or we can be inside the belly of the whale . We can be helpless before an addiction , or we can be possessed by a demon . We can vacillate in our prayer lives between fervor and dark nights , or we can vacillate between being with Jesus ‘ in Galilee ’ or with him in ‘ Jerusalem ’. We can be paralyzed as we stand before a globalization that ’ s overwhelming , or we can be standing with Jesus on the borders of Samaria in a first conversation with a Syro-Phoenician woman . We can be struggling with fidelity and with keeping our commitments in relationships , or we can be standing with Joshua before God , receiving instructions to kill off the Canaanites if we are to sustain ourselves in the Promised Land . We can be suffering from arthritis , or we can be sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane .
The language we use to understand an experience makes a huge , huge difference in what that experience means to us . In “ The Closing of the American Mind ,” Allan Bloom uses a rather earthy , but highly illustrative , example to explain this . He quotes Plato who tells us that during their breaks his students sit around and tell wonderful stories about the meaning of their immortal longings . My students , Bloom laments , sit around during their breaks and tell stories about being horny .
We are losing the language of the soul and we are poorer for it .
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