Singleness of Heart

This post is a continuation of "Nativity", in which I wrote about feeling a sense of possession of the Episcopal tradition native to me, but not precisely belonging to it or in it.

I tried to think about how this feeling came about and what goods of that tradition kept me on its threshold, neither in nor out.

In this post, I want to think about creative ways of belonging among people of connected to different traditions and ways of openness to traditions not one's own.

Some of my thoughts on this involve examples of what some people call "syncretism". However, for a variety of reasons, I don't want to limit myself to this term in the strict sense.

I do want to talk meaningfully about worlds in which these propositions were not problematic, namely those of imperial China. I know of course that we moderns not belong to a world as open to that assumption. This is because modernization made Christianity's individualist and unitary mode of commitment the model for what counted as a tradition.

As a result of similar processes, when Westerners have tried to think beyond their own traditions, they have tended to objectify and appropriate those of others very broadly. 

For this, you can think of 1920s avant-garde artists like Picasso attracted to Asian and African art for its geometry. They adapted indigenous art forms freely without learning about context or artistic tradition. In other words, they put the art in the object position rather than considering other kinds of subjectivity in what the original artists were trying to achieve.

It's this, that awful ersatz quality of a jade Buddha on a credenza desk, that I want to avoid. How can one be open to difference through appreciating its distinction? How can one be open to something without the claiming to know it, to be subject over it?

The start I would make is with the literati (wen ren 文人) of high-imperial China. The scholar-officials (shi da fu 士大夫) were defined through their relationship with the Confucian tradition. Scholars like Han Yu 韓愈, who died in 824, took a protectionist attitude toward Confucianism, and this defensive posture is at the root of learning of the way (dao xue 道學) of neo-Confucianism from the Song. 

However, the neo-Confucians' proprietary outlook and interest in incorporating Buddhist philosophy into their own tradition represented the exception rather than the rule. What more tended to happen was that the traditions remained more or less distinct, and they were considered open for the artistic and intellectual cultivation of the wen ren.

The consummate literatus, Su Shi 蘇軾, who died in 1101, defended the old line of Confucian government against reform and centralization. However, he is better remembered as the author of a treatise on art that praised the spontaneity and freedom of a true intoxicant. These traditions, and the open, expressive arts of the literati style show a Daoist retreat from the tedium and conventionality of politics.

This spirit permeated the last thousand or so years of Chinese intellectual and artistic history. Although, the idea of this kind of syncretism has no easy catchword. The attitude toward tradition changed when the world changed, and needless to say the Communists did not believe one should be open a plurality of possibilities.

One way to think about what was lost in the world of the wen ren was the idea of the plurality of a person. I mean this more than just the old idea of a Chinese elite that was "Confucian at the office and Daoist in the rock garden".

I mean a person had multiple purposes and different fields for different cultivations. These ideals, like moral sincerity and artistic expression, interlocked, and imperial society had the idea of a scholar-artist-publican at its apex.

Where there might be room for difference in a modern society in which production seen as the only direction and accomplishment in life, I do not know.

Thinking of this idea of a person's life as unitary versus plural, in Western traditions, Aristotelian happiness is not supposed reside in a plurality of purposes but rather in a singular direction. This idea of a single purpose for a life and a hierarchy of goods has been the dominant model of Western ethical thought.

And so, to argue that there might be multiple fields in which one can be subject to different kinds of learning shaped toward different kinds of perfection would be a departure from institutional Christianity as much as modern humanism. But, recognizing difference with the past as well as in the present might instruct us about the possibilities of where we might go.