Grace via Thomas Aquinas

[Mark Kohut]

Maybe Or : Be cool but care.

On 1/28/18, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
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> Very intriguing and insightful discussion.
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> 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.
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>  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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> I know I am too hard on Aquinas here, but let’s just say I have my reasons.
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