A different kind of knowing

...The first time I read Rilke's first Duino Elegy or came to the last paragraph in Joyce's The Dead, and felt deep stillness and astonishment, I knew that in some way I was changed, that if I didn't betray that moment things would not be the same from now on This expenence is, to be sure, as fuzzy at one end as it is intense at the other How would things not be the same7 What would it mean, not to betray that stillness—only that I should remember it9 That might be enough...

...A DIFFERENT KIND OF KNOWING FOR THOSE WITH EARS TO HEAR ne of the most fnghtening images in the modern world is that of the not uncommon sort of concentration camp guard who could move from the murderous world of the camp—who could witness, even take active part in, the humiliation and murder of other human beings—to his home, where he could put his children to bed with great tenderness, and listen to Mozart, weeping at the beauty of the expenence The connection between perception, sensing, sensibility—the realm of the aesthetic—and the kind of knowledge we can articulate and act upon is not at all clear But it is essential that we try to understand the connection as deeply as we can One of the great myths of the Enlightenment is that education, an acquaintance with art and literature and the great thought of the past, can make us better people and more competent, even more moral, members of society World War II should have ended the power of that myth, but it lives on despite all the evidence...

...An experience of overwhelming beauty might bring even the most evil person to a kind of stillness, but if the larger context is lacking, if no serious demand has ever been made on that person, it will remain merely an overwhelming aesthetic experience We have allowed the Enlightenment and the Romantic strains in our culture to limit us: things are understood rationally, or emotionally We must consider the possibility that one can also understand the world spiritually, that this dimension is not a variant of the subjective realm of the emotions or the objective realm of reason, but has its own objectivity and subjectivity...

...The objectivity is what Orthodox spirituality means when it speaks of apatheia...

...Kalhstos Ware points out that "the 'dispassioned' person, so far from being apathetic, is the one whose heart burns with love for God, for other humans, for every living creature, for all that God has made (The Orthodox Way, Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1981...

...An expenence cannot, in and of itself, educate us or form us, this is Romantic fallacy...

...We are still working with some notions that come down to us from the Enlightenment and from the Romantic movement From the Enlightenment we get the idea that to understand something rationally is to understand it sufficiently (This is the mentality that says that theology could be taught as well by an atheist as a believer, to the extent that theology is a consistent intellectual endeavor) The Romantics, who reacted to the smug certainties of the Enlightenment, have given us the idea that to understand something completely we must understand it emotionally, from within...

...Tolstoy was often as full of delusion and self-pity as he was capable of brilliant insight Walker Percy once said that the only two wnters he could think of who were also decent people were Chekhov and Eudora Welty We could say that this is simply a matter of our living in a fallen world, that in all cases Paul's statement remains true...

...And for the reptiles also he prays with great compassion, which rises up endlessly in his heart after the example of God...

...Nor can the application of reason or a set of standards educate us (This could be called the rationalistic—or canonical—fallacy ) Both must be understood within a greater context A person who is formed by prayer, by liturgy, by ascetic struggle, will respond to the world differently from someone who is constantly distracted, who never worships, who responds to every desire by yielding to it And most of us probably live somewhere in between those two poles The question is not only one of responding to the world differently, but has to do also with our capacity for seeing the world We bring the formed self—formed either by prayer or by distraction—to how we reason, to how we envision the world...

...The idea of right understanding, truer observation, seems elitist in a time which doesn't feel comfortable with hierarchies of any sort, or the idea that there may be a privileged understanding, a kind of knowing more real than another...

...The good I would do, I do not do " But it is one thing to say that we can fail in our attempts to live decently, to be good...

...He quotes Saint Isaac the Syrian: "The heart of such a man grows tender, and he cannot endure to hear of or look upon any injury, even the smallest suffering, inflicted upon anything m creation Therefore he never ceases to pray with tears even for the dumb animals, for the enemies of truth, and for all who do harm to it, asking that they may be guarded and receive God's mercy...

...It is this more real knowing, a knowing different from and more important than reason or emotion, that Jesus pointed to when he said, "He who has ears, let him hear...

...But in an important sense, this isn't the point Some great Orthodox saints prayed before icons which were dreadful, from an artistic and canonical point of view, and some horrible Orthodox live surrounded by lovely icons...

...but simply to have been brought to the edge of mystery seems to be enough, at the aesthetic level, and not nearly enough, at the level of action The purpose of art is not to make us better people, nor is art a form of moral exhortation It is in fact possible for great art to participate in great evil, for art to be aesthetically impressive and degrade at the 9 OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey same time (There is a genuine sadism that informs Picasso's Weeping Women, shown recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) I am not referring here to the terrible influence a brilliantly written but perverse novel might have on someone's behavior What I am interested in is the ability of the Nazi to listen to Bach or to read Rilke, and continue to be a Nazi, with no apparent internal contradiction I cannot say he is not moved to the same stillness I am But what do we think we have found there, either of us9 This is related to another problem the behavior of the artists and wnters who can move us this way Dostoevsky was at once capable of writing The Brothers Karamazov and of behaving quite boorishly...

...We have somehow wedded these contradictory ideas in our understanding of moral education We can't understand the Nazi who weeps at Mozart in the evening and turns on the gas in the morning, because we have been taught to believe that schooling, a deliberate exposure to culture, makes us better people The place in which the aesthetic and religious are most clearly wedded may be the icon Many icons are extraordinarily beautiful Rublev's Trinity is an example of the sort of work of art before which you are brought to stillness...

...Without this hierarchy (which Meister Eckhart, among others, certainly knew— he spoke of the "spiritual aristocrat") we are left with the concentration camp guard and the great theologian Karl Barth, both moved to the depths by Mozart, and both equals in the only kinds of understanding our age allows ? 10...

...it is another to live with what seems to be a radical disconnection between the realm of the beautiful and any truth worth living for Is there no insight in Bach, or Rilke, or, if there is, does it have anything to do with the truths we must live by7 We need a larger frame, I think...

...It is easy to see why it is so seductive, and especially seductive to people who have experienced the great power of art to bring us into the presence of beauty, sometimes so forcefully that it literally takes your breath away...

...The beauty which brings us to stillness, in Bach or in Rublev's Trinity, can be understood only if someone has brought this wider living, this truer understanding, to his or her seeing...