Grace via Thomas Aquinas

[Joseph Tracy]

Very intriguing and insightful discussion. 

Not wanting to argue for argument’s sake but I read P’s use of grace in ATD slightly differently, and hope this might add another dimension. Things being exctly what they are does not exclude all religious understanding. It is a good summary of certain lines of Buddhist or Taoist thought, and as an experience is quite universal. But it also includes as Laura says the preterite and is not limited to religious connotation.

 Still he is choosing a western Christianized word with roots in Greek mythology( Grace per se is simply not a "Thomist concept”. Aquinas is one of several theological interpreters of a theological word originally adapted for Christian use in both the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John). It is an odd word that is not a teaching of Jesus but a theological/religious interpretation of the unique nature of faith in the ’Christ’.  it is also a word that has come to take on profound cultural weight that in many ways transcends its dicey theological roots. One vision of that transcendent beauty is much better known to most readers or persons than Aquinas , and that is the song Amazing Grace where the core meaning includes 1) mercy,  2) hearing reality/truth, and 3) seeing reality/truth, .  If you take away the theological add-ons about divinity these qualities fit Lew’s experience quite powerfully. He was clearly carrying a weight of guilt  from which he is delivered and is then characterized by the difference between what he is  actually seeing/hearing and what those who hire him want him to see and hear. I agree with the Joyce based interpretation of grace the Thomas E puts forth that Pynchon has Lew choose the word grace to define his experience of clarity and liberation both because it comes unbidden and because it is transfigurative in the sense of liberation from illusions and from guilt and unitive with the larger universe.
  The divinity may not be essential here but the quality of liberation and acceptance as an improvement over where he was before this experience is essential, hence the fittingness of the word grace.


So the question arises  is it even possible for anyone to see or understand exactly what things are?  What would that be like? Is it just circular nonsense, a meaningless equation- 5=5? Is it, as Siddhartha implied, an experience that is untranslatable in words but available to anyone as experience? 
 Is it the nature of mind to always be sailing toward grace in the sense of always accepting what is and also always wanting to expand the knowledge of what is as one lives in time? And where does compassion come in? Because compassion seems to be implicit in  Buddhism and Chistian grace and in Lew’s experience and  his non-aggressive nature. As a detective he is more an instrument of understanding and sorting the real from the false  than catching the bad guy. 

I can accept the ambiguous nature of the final lines of ATD, and Thomas and Monte make a good case for that, but for me it is ambiguous rather than cynical or sinister. I suspect P knows it will be read both ways and want us to think about whether the eucatastrophic conclusion promised by  agonist belief systems  and also  logical positivism or techno salvation are really seeing things as they are? Like GR he is putting the future in our hands while pointing at our proclivity for self deception and self destruction.

For me the problem with Aquinas is the problem with all theologies, they wish to own and interpret experiences and realities that simply do not have neat boundaries and that mortals are unqualified to conclusively interpret. Aquinas is reasoning fairly accurately about the human appetite for a transhuman knowledge but he casts the anwer to that hunger as “him” a male god of omniscience and omnipotence, doling out appropriately sized soup bowls of grace to those who come to the soup line with the proper theological humility. This is not even Biblical, but simply invented theology of early bishops inheriting patriarchal myths. But Aquinas knows he is addressing a real experience of tranformative insight and presuming to have an explanation for that experience is his gig as a priest. A Jehovah’s witness is not much different, unless of course that is the one true path, as are so many others.
 In that sense Lew’s perception of  things being exactly what they are is a defense not against the experience of grace as some kind of divine liberation ,  and not against grace as a Zen type direct and unfiltered experience of suchness,  but against the theologies that seek to own and define grace, against particular rules, or methods or precepts, against claims of ownership or outcome that tend to enslavement, passivity  and dangerous hierarchies rather than shared insight, and compassion or even shared food, which was central to how Jesus taught.  
   What makes me see the ending of ATD as ambiguous rather than cynical is the transformation of the Chums over the course of the novel. They reject blind service to an unknown authority, make friends and allies of those being portrayed as enemies, realize their need for the feminine , both earthly and divine and they become more democratic and wary of war. If the chums represent fiction itself and the artists’/ humans highest dreams and insights, they have gone from being Thomist in their orientation( tools of the mighty presuming to kick butt in one-a-them just wars) to being the fragile but hopeful vision that we can change and find more compassionate   and earth-friendly ways.

I know I am too hard on Aquinas here, but let’s just say I have my reasons.
   




  





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