339 - Apology For Wonder

Apology For Wonder
By Sam Keen
218 pp. New York, Harper & Row, 1969. $5.95.

"Secular Christianity" has come upon hard times, and those whose business it is to announce trends have been confidently proclaiming for a year or two that it was only a passing phenomenon and a new religiosity-different from the old, but also different in kind from the spirit of secularity-is in the making. Sam Keen is one of those who from the first had misgivings about the secular impulse; he has been putting out hints that it is blindly optimistic and, even worse, excessively Apollonian; and now we have his full-scale sketch of an alternative direction in which to look. It is presented in a thoughtful and literate way, in what is essentially a popular book but one that will stimulate theologians too.

His objection to secular Christianity and its non-theistic kin is that they are merely the ideological expression of homo faber's relation to the world, a view of things that rejects all reverence for mystery, all sense of the sacred, as an obstacle to man's freedom. It assumes that there is "no wisdom resident within the ecology of nature," "no order of nature that man is obliged not to violate" (p. 132). Consequently homo faber puts himself in the position of an omnipotent deity, a Logos conferring order on a world that is in itself indifferent or meaningless or hostile; and because the given has no sacredness, he need not respect it-his own purposes are the only locus of holiness, and he is even willing to entertain one or another totalitarian scheme in order to bring them to fruition.

Keen's refutation of this aggressive and exploitative attitude toward "the given" (the natural world, but also one's fellow men and one's own feelings and impulses) is based on an analysis of its "psychopathology," and, by extension, its "sociopathology" and "ideopathology." "The obsession with clarity," he says, "is the scrubbing compulsion of the mind-a defense mechanism to guard against the threat of the chaotic mystery of life" (p. 130).

He knows that this is not the fault of Western or Christian man as such; it has been occasioned largely by the rise of a deterministic view of the world based (correctly or not) on physical science, for "when all is necessary, the given is equivalent to the imposed, and man is not a recipient but a victim" (p. 173). However understandable its rise may be, it results in a new Gnosticism, even more radical than the ancient ver-

340 - Apology For Wonder

sion (here he is following Hans Jonas's essay on "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism" in The Phenomenon of Life). In a word, the modern state of mind is one-sidedly Apollonian, beginning with a sense of confinement and constraint by the situation in which man finds himself, leading to an obsessive desire to purify himself of all contamination by the powers of nature that constantly impinge on him, and ending with the paranoid conviction that these natural forces are hostile to him and that he must violently subdue them.

This unkind analysis of the "secular" premise does not mean that he is ready to go over to an unrestrained Dionysianism. To be sure, he is inclined more in this direction, with his loving descriptions of wonder in children and in archaic religions, his taking of the characteristcally Dionysian art-form, the dance, as a model of the ideal life-spontaneous, ceaselessly aware of the movements of one's partners, decisive and bold in execution-and his frequent references to Zorba the Greek as a picture of the truly healthy man. And yet, though he is fascinated by the Dionysianism of Norman O. Brown, he knows that it is a willful cultivation of schizophrenia, a retreat to raw inward experience, melting the sense of reality into the play of the imagination and blurring the distinction between fantasy and action. He knows that this undefined and ultimately indecisive state of mind leads to terrifying feelings of boundlessness, a loss of a sense of identity and place, a being threatened by the irrational and the unpredictable. And he knows that opposites may meet in the dynamics of the psyche-that this fanatical and daemonic Dionysianism may be the ultimate consequence of Apollonian man's loss of contact with all that is genuinely other than himself and beyond his control.

Keen's own ideal man he calls (provocatively, but with an altogether proper Latinity) homo tempestivus, the timely, seasonable, opportune man who knows the time for everything and trusts his own sensibilities. He is not pure Dionysian man, borne along by every passing impulse; he is Apollonian enough to accept the limits of the given and to recognize his own ability to change them by resolve and action. Therefore his feeling of wonder at the given is not that of archaic man, a type of wonder which is religious in the bad sense, refusing to assume "full responsibility for remaking the world closer to the heart's desire" (p. 192). Keen therefore is not among those who are ready to cop out in face of the tasks of secular man; he only wants an attitude of suspicion and resentment toward nature to be replaced by a basic trust in the surroundings that nourish man, a simplicity and directness of experience, a confidence in human impulses.

341 - Apology For Wonder

What does this all come to? Scarcely a new theology, at least in its present form, for theological statements are avoided, perhaps out of despair at their possibility: "Whether we continue to talk about God is not so important as whether we retain the sense of wonder which keeps us aware that ours is a holy place," he says (p. 21 1), and he thinks that "the sacred is incarnate in flesh, things, and events or not at all" (p. 210). What he has done here belongs to the behavioral study of religion-its phenomenology and psychology and sociology-and is essentially neutral to theological questions, only laying down, on the basis of the dialectic of the emotions, certain requirements that must be observed by any future theology.

It will be evident that an important point has been made, and it may be telling against many trends in current thought. But I doubt that all the going options in theology are thereby called into question. Keen himself knows that the "secular" sense for man's capabilities is here to stay, and although it may often have been expressed in language that glorifies the rational ego at the expense of feeling and impulse, the secular attitude is patient of a more congenial sense for the natural. Whitehead and Teilhard have long since shown us how man's dependence on a host of natural forces and his need to remain a creature of earth even in his strivings can be affirmed without losing the feel for his own capabilities and lapsing into an "archaic" reverence and submissiveness toward whatever occurs. Secular theology, challenged by the possibilities of technology and political action, and driven by a Calvinist rationality, is perhaps guilty of angelic pretensions. But that hardly justifies a retreat from public responsibility into the merely private and aesthetic. If those who have recently been taking up sensitivity training, seeking psychedelic experience, and peeping into the new eroticism should read Keen's book (and they should, for it is calculated to appeal to them), they will discover that it is critical of some of their more extreme fantasies. But it may be that the love affair that has been developing of late between the activists and the Dionysians under the somewhat doting patronage of Herbert Marcuse will develop into a marriage characterized by fidelity and mutual correction; if so, it is a movement that will bear continued watching by the theologians, and Keen's book gives us some idea of the course it ought to follow.

Eugene TeSelle
Vanderbilt Divinity School
Nashville, Tennessee