[DING]
You know I love using this bell
to call people to attention.
This is an old bell from
a Buddhist practice circle
that I've been involved
with and off and on for most
of my adult life.
And I was the chair of
the University committee
on tenure promotions and
appointments for a year.
And when I wanted to call
people to order and get people
to focus, people were
often off on tangents,
I would just take the
bell out and ring it.
And invariably,
even though there
were many people who objected
to my use of the bell,
and told me so on
many occasions--
They did it anyway.
They did it anyway.
Exactly, Tim, exactly.
They did it anyway.
It's very, very--
I don't know what
it is about bells.
[INAUDIBLE], can we ask
you to put the inner
shades down because we're
being blinded over here?
Do you know how to do that?
[SIDE CONVERSATIONS]
[DING]
I want to thank you all for
giving me the opportunity
to ring my bell again
because I really
enjoy the sound of this bell.
So I want to welcome you on this
absolutely gorgeous afternoon--
an afternoon in which
many people would much
prefer to be outside.
And it's the kind of day in
which my students would often
say to me, Professor
Roth, Professor Roth,
can we have class outside?
And I would go, no.
No, cannot do that.
There are just too
many distractions
to have class outside.
So my name's Hal Roth
and I'm the director
of the Contemplatives
Studies Initiative at Brown.
Many of you may or may not
know that Contemplative Studies
is now a formal concentration,
undergraduate concentration.
And what we do in
Contemplative Studies
is we look at human
contemplative experience
across cultures and across time
from humanistic, scientific,
and artistic approaches.
What we try to do is
examine the variety
of contemplative
experience and explore them
from both the kind of
traditional third-person
perspective that we find
throughout the Academy,
and what we call kind
of new and innovative
critical first-person
perspectives.
And we also, in doing
that, urge students
to assess their meaning for
themselves in their lives
and the significance not only
historically but personally.
We talk about contemplative
states and contemplation.
What do we mean?
I mean in order to have
contemplative studies,
you need to have some idea
of what contemplation is.
And so the kind of relatively
arbitrary definition
that we've come up with is it's
the focusing of the attention
in a sustained fashion,
leading to deepened
states of concentration,
tranquility, and insight.
Leading to a broadening
of self-awareness,
and leading to
self-contextualizing
experiences that are the basis
for a whole variety of other
regarding virtues.
They occur on a spectrum
from the absorption
in an activity, kind
of spontaneously,
to those that are
deliberately cultivated
in religious traditions.
For this semester,
this is the first event
of a very, very
busy academic year
and particularly fall semester.
We are organizing,
or co-organizing,
seven different events.
We in fact are
starting next week,
our lecture series, called
Mindfulness, Science,
and Society.
If you would like
more information,
please go to our website.
You can find us if you
google contemplative studies.
Or actually, if you
go to the A to Z,
or also known as the
A to zed in Europe--
[INAUDIBLE]
I really it's
specifically, Tim, for you,
because I know you're back
from leave, and it might be
the Z might be hard.
So you can see the
lecture series.
Our first lecture is, in
that series, is next week.
And it is Professor
Ramaswami Mahalingam,
from the psychology department
at University of Michigan.
He's going to be talking on
mindfulness and social justice.
I think it's also
here in this room.
And he will also be doing
a workshop the next day.
So for more information, please
go to our contemplative studies
website.
So I'd like to begin
by thanking you
all for coming, and thanking the
Department of Religious Studies
for cosponsoring this event.
Also thanking the Contemplative
Studies Project Coordinator,
Anne Hart, without whom none of
this really would be happening.
[APPLAUSE]
Those of us who focus on
contemplative traditions
naturally tend to be--
at least at this point
in human history-- drawn to
Asian contemplative traditions.
And we don't often
stop to appreciate
that there are very longstanding
and profound contemplative
traditions that have developed
in the European West.
Traditions of introspection
and meditation
that are really,
really important
if we want to understand
the history of concepts
of self and subjectivity
as they've evolved.
And that we kind of tend
to assume are universal--
not only across cultures,
but also across times.
We often fall into
the perspective
of assuming that all of the
values and standards and ways
that we have of
conceiving of the nature
of our own experience
are the same.
Maybe if we assume,
even, that they're not
the same across cultures,
we assume that they
are the same across time.
And the fact of the
matter is they're not.
I was just reading
something last week,
which talked about different
patterns of sleep that
happened that were really common
in this country, relatively,
recently--
100, 120 years ago.
Instead of people
staying up late and going
to bed at 11 or 12
o'clock and then sleeping
until you woke up and
started work the next day,
people would fall
asleep as the sunset.
And then they would
wake up around midnight,
and they'd do a bunch of things.
Ben Franklin,
apparently, liked to read
in the nude in front
of his fireplace
when he got up at midnight.
And they'd get up
for a few hours,
and they'd go back to
sleep, and wake up again.
It never occurred to me that
people in different cultures
and at different
points of time didn't
have exactly the same
sleeping patterns that we do.
I mean, it's kind of
really interesting.
And we tend to be
almost hopelessly
anachronistic in the way
that we look at history.
Although, it's really
important that we
start to develop, or
continue to develop,
insights that are much more
sophisticated than that.
And show that the way in
which we look at our own--
we examine, we think
about our own experience--
has a history itself.
And with that
context, this is one
of the reasons why our
distinguished speaker
today is here.
He spent the last 15 years
in deep study and reflection
on the history of meditation
and spiritual exercises
in Catholicism.
Professor Moshe
Sluhovsky is chair
of the School of History at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
And he is the Paulette
and Claude Kelman chair
in the study of French Jewry.
He finished his PhD
at Princeton in 1992.
And he's had a very
distinguished career
that's included lecturing
at Caltech, UCLA, Cal State.
He's also spent a
year here at Brown.
He is the author
of numerous books--
six books-- with there's
a seventh in press.
Numerous articles--
he's won numerous grants
and fellowships.
His published work has focused
on the intellectual history
of late medieval and
early modern Europe,
and, particularly,
in recent years,
on the concepts of
self-hood and modernity.
He has a new book
that's coming out
the press will be coming
out in the next year.
Maybe he will talk about it.
The topic of his talk
today is the Birth
of the Modern Introspective Self
in Early Modern Catholicism.
Without further
ado, please join me
in giving a warm Brown welcome
to Professor Moshe Sluhovsky.
[APPLAUSE]
Good afternoon, I want to thank
all of you for being here.
It is indeed a
beautiful afternoon.
As Hal was talking,
I was thinking
about [INAUDIBLE] about
10 years ago was here
when I presented a new
project, a new topic, that
had to do with introspection.
I'm here today, after sending
the book out, so those of you--
I'm sure that all of you
remember each and every word
I've ever said-- or at
least said, 10 years ago.
So I'm sure that
for some of you,
it would be wonderful to reflect
back and compare what I said
back then to what I say now.
Maybe you can even catch me
and telling me afterwards
that in fact you have not said
anything new, but I doubt it.
I doubt your memory.
I doubt it.
The self-- there
is a mixed crowd.
I see historians, and then
other people from religion.
So some of you may
find some things
that I say totally [INAUDIBLE]
because they're too historical.
Some of you may
find things that I
say totally [INAUDIBLE] because
everybody who does religion
knows them.
You will remember the
other half of the audience.
The self is a historical
configuration.
Granted, the
neuronal and chemical
processes that take
place in the brain,
that while they
change over millennia
are historically stable.
In a sense that they
have not changed
much in recorded in a
period of recorded history.
And I don't think they're
very likely to change much
in the near future.
But how to make sense of
what occurs in the brain?
How to evaluate, how to
value it, how to view
it are all historical,
and therefore,
also social and political
and gendered norms.
The self exists only
in historical settings.
My purpose in this talk today
is to address the creation
of a very specific self.
A self that is connected
with the modern subject.
This modern subject
was defined first
by philosophers like Rene
Descartes and John Locke,
and then by a sociologist
like Max Weber.
And we pretty much
identify him intuitively.
And I refer to this modern
subject with the pronoun him,
and not him or her, because
the modern subject has always
been perceived as male.
The modern self
I'm talking about
is rational,
coherent, individual,
a possessor of
inalienable rights,
and is directed in his
actions by an inner truth.
The inner truth--
this who am I-ness--
it's awkward, but
this is exactly what
I tried to capture.
This who am I-ness is one of
the essences of the modern self
and is the topic
of my talk today.
This inner truth could be in
18th century businessman's
truth whose core identity,
his essence is an interpreter.
It could be the 19th century
romantic nationalist,
who is, first and foremost,
a German, or [INAUDIBLE].
It could be the 20th century
girl and lesbian activist,
who was born that way.
And it could be the 21st
century transgendered person,
who transforms his or her
body to accord with its true
who am I-ness.
They all claim an inner truth,
an identity that defines them,
and that society should,
therefore, enable
them to pursue in the world.
It's sad and it is
coming into being
of this very specific self
of these subjectivities, all
that sense of who am I-ness that
I want to examine in this talk.
I might do it within the context
of the years 1500 to 1650.
I argue that between
1500 and 1650,
some Catholic religious orders--
mostly but not
only the Jesuits--
cultivated and promoted new
techniques of introspection
and attentiveness
that taught people
to recognize their inner truth.
These techniques
were a precondition
for the formation of new selves.
But unlike modern
selves, who claim
agency due to their cool self,
early modern Catholic selves
embraced subjugation as better
defeating their essence.
I am honored and very
pleased to be here today.
And I am grateful
to Linda and Hal
for inviting me to talk
to you about Catholicism
and introspection and
modernity and to really
think comparatively
about these issues.
I'm talking about the
Catholicism of late medieval
and early modern Catholicism--
and especially the Catholicism
of the 16th century.
This Catholicism is often
portrayed as conservative,
hierarchical, defencive--
think of the term Counter
Reformation--
and aggressively anti-spiritual.
16th century Catholicism
recalls to mind the Inquisition,
the Council of Trent,
the curtailment
reflect medieval
female mysticism,
and severe restrictions on
reading and publishing text
by male mystics of the
previous centuries.
It is also, of
course, the century
of conquest, colonialism, and
genocides, of religious wars
in Europe itself, and an
ongoing religious struggle
against Islam.
But I also want to remind us
that the 16th century was also
the century of to
resolve [INAUDIBLE]
and John of the Cross, of
unprecedented diffusion
of vernacular books of
prayer and meditation,
and of Catholic fascination
with Chinese religious rights.
And while mindfulness,
meditation,
and contemplation are commonly--
as Hal has already mentioned--
have even intuitively
today associated
in our mind, scholarly or
otherwise, with the East
and mostly with Buddhism,
I want to rescue
from partially oblivion, the
immense wealth and beauty
of the Catholic traditions
of heightened states
of consciousness and awareness.
I need to clarify
one little thing.
I will refer repeatedly
to what is still and has
been since the 16th
century the most
important Christian
collection of meditations.
And this is the small book
by Ignatius of Loyola,
the Spiritual Exercises.
Loyola was a Basque
but a founder
of the Society of Jesus, wrote
his meditations in Spanish.
It's based on a collection
of preexisting meditation's
and spiritual exercises.
But also a series of
mystical experiences
he had as a layperson.
And this is an important point.
He then trained his
followers to practice
a series of meditation.
And the collection known
as Spiritual Exercises
or the Spiritual Exercises is
still today the most printed
and the most practiced
set of meditations
in the Christian world--
Protestants and Catholic alike.
And this book is second to the
Bible in a number of languages
it has been translated to.
So the reason I'm
emphasizing it because I'm
going to use the term
spiritual exercises
as a generic term for
the kinds of meditations
I'm talking about.
But I will also
sometimes I'll have
to refer to it when I talk about
this very specific collection
by Ignatius.
So I will try to make
it very clear when
I'm talking about what.
I also want to apologize in
the first part of my talk
is to be very theoretical, and
the language sometimes it--
please tell me when
it's not easy to follow
what I'm trying to say.
I want to concentrate
of the ideas
of two leading authorities
of the previous century
of the 20th century--
the German theologian,
Karl Rahner,
and the French philosopher,
Michel Foucault,
and what they said
about the connections
among introspective mindfulness,
Catholicism, and modernity.
In the second part, I
will be less theoretical,
and I will talk---
and I will assess the
theoretical abstraction
of these people, within the
setting of specific practices.
So fasten your seat belts.
When we think of truth, we
think of Christian context.
We think of the truth of
the word and of tradition.
In other words,
the truth of dogma.
But there's always been
another form of truth
in Christianity--
the truth period.
The truth of Revelation--
in capital R-- always
existed side by side
with the truth of
lowercase revelations.
The truth of
lowercase revelation
was to be recognized by
the self within the self.
I'm quoting Foucault.
"Christianity
is bound the individual
himself to the obligation
to search for a certain
secret deep within himself.
A certain secret that when
brought into the light of day,
it manifested, must pay a
decisive role in his path
to salvation," end of quote.
But how does one
connect the obligation
to believe in the truth of
dogma with the obligation
to believe in this
internalized [INAUDIBLE] truth?
What makes experiencing truth
and then speaking it possible?
Who determines whether the
individualized experience
of a revelation,
lowercase, is actually
the same as the truth
of capital R Revelation?
And what if the truth of
faith and the truth of self
disagree, or
contradict each other?
The technique of
spiritual exercises
of mindfulness and
introspection, I suggest,
is the space in which these
questions were both experienced
and debated.
By spiritual exercise,
I use now generically,
I mean not the title
of Loyola's collection,
but a set of techniques
that are intended
to enhance in a practitioner
a sense of attuness,
again, awkward but precise.
A cognitive and emotive
attentiveness to one's
own mind or soul or interiority.
The three most
important techniques
that are at the core of my--
of the book that is in press--
are confession and especially
general confession.
I'll say a few words about it.
The examination of
one's conscience
and the writing or dictating
of spiritual diaries.
These practices were
acquired by interactions
with a master, known
as a director of souls.
And a process of acquiring them
is called in Greek psychogogy--
psycho, as in psychology,
and agogy as in pedagogy.
Literally, leading
the soul or acquiring
knowledge of the soul.
For this kind of
introspective mindfulness,
early modernists prefer the
terms affection and attention.
Spiritual exercises
usually begin
with meditating on a
subject, rather than
to the practitioner's
devotional life.
By an act of
concentration, the mediator
enters a receptive, somewhat
passive frame of mind.
The meditation then
recalls an imagination
from the practitioner's life all
from the great Christian drama
of incarnation,
sacrifice, and salvation,
and brings this
imagination into the mind.
This focusing of
attention leads, in turn,
to an affective and
introspective recognition
of the relations
between their Creator,
capital C, and all
created things--
using Christian terminology.
All created things,
which include
the practitioner himself
or herself, and, of course,
gives new awareness
of the direct impact
of these relations on
the mediator's life.
I will have more to say
about meditation's attention
and introspection
later in my talk.
But at this point, I want to
see how these two luminaries
that I've mentioned earlier--
Michel Foucault and the
German Jesuit, Karl Rahner--
dealt with these
spiritual practices
and their relations to
modern subjectivities.
Rahner is practically
forgotten today.
But he was extremely influential
in Catholic and ecumenical
circles in the second
half of the 20th century.
He was one of the
theologians accused
of promoting a new
theology [INAUDIBLE]
in the 1940s and 1950s.
Namely, putting
too much emphasis
on personal relations between
God and each individual,
including the [INAUDIBLE]
and our personal salvation.
In the 1950s, Rahner had
been viewed with suspicion
and was accused of the
era known as modernism.
But in 1962, he was brought
back in from the cold
to become one of the leading
theologians reformulating
some of the tenets
of Catholicism
in Vatican [INAUDIBLE].
Rhaner's theology derives from
his understanding of modernity,
of God's communication
with the created world,
and of human being's
inability to know anything
at all with certainty.
In all of the
above, he believed,
early modern Catholicism-- and
especially Ignatius of Loyola--
had broken new grounds.
According to Rhaner, I
remind you, he was a Jesuit--
it was Loyola's immediate
experience of God
that marked the beginning
of the modern era.
Ignatius, Rahner said, and, I
quote, "Together with Luther
and Calvin is one of the
great figures at the beginning
for Christian modernity."
Of course anyone is
familiar with the hostility
and animosity of Catholics
to these two guys, Luther
and Calvin--
were shocked, and
should be shocked,
by him putting the
three of them together.
He, Loyola, is a forerunner
of modern Christianity
because in his Spiritual
Exercises, the book,
he comprehended that the
very essence of Christianity
is an individual mystical
experience of God.
And because he had made this
experience something that
is no longer, I quote,
"a special privilege
of a person chosen from
an elite," end quote,
but rather a grace
that is available
for all human beings--
even non-Christians.
In other words, in his
collection of meditations,
Loyola put together
a set of exercises
that made mystical experience
available to all practitioners.
Each day, each and
every individual
who goes through the
process of psychogogy,
of being directed in the
meditation, can encounter God.
I will commit heresy by saying
that what he's advocating,
basically, is the priesthood
of all believers, which
is, of course, the reason the
Christians-- this exact quote
is what broke Western
Christianity in 1517.
500 years ago, right.
Yeah, 500 years ago.
October 17, 499 years
ago, 499 years ago.
Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises--
Rahner reminds his readers--
had already been given
to believers in 1534,
before Loyola acquired any
theological training, before he
went to University, before
he became a religious person.
Put differently,
theological training
is secondary to the interiorized
and immediate experience
of grace.
And since, Rahner has said,
"the devout person of the future
will either be a mystic or will
cease to be anything at all,"
End of quote.
The spiritual exercises,
which train people
in how to become mystics, in
the sense that Rahner employs,
are the key to the survival of
Christianity in the modern age.
Rahner, in fact,
claims the primacy
of the interiorized individual
and subjective immediate
experience over other forms of
interaction with or exposure
to God, implicitly even hinting
that the truth of experience
should enjoy precedence over the
truth of dogma and tradition.
And since experience
is always necessary
in an individual event,
Rahner, again, implicitly,
was hinting at the possibility
the individual believe--
that the individual believer
comes before the church.
I want to say differently
because it's important.
What Rahner was arguing
was that the spiritual--
that Loyola's
spiritual exercises--
were modern because
Loyola had understood
that the only way
for individuals
to experience the divine was
through immediate experiences
of God.
Loyola was therefore
a forerunner
of a method of
experiencing God that
was egalitarian and
accessible to the laity
and even to unlearned women.
This mode of
experiencing God results
from a turn to this
subject, namely, a respect
for individual freedom and
liberation from constraints
of church and from communal
forms of identity formation.
This remains the case,
and I quote, again,
"even if the subject in
his or her own freedom
has absorbed and
accepted Christian faith,
in other words, when the
subject is and remains
a member of the
church," end quote.
My reading of it,
the individual--
in modernity-- the individual
experience of grace,
of encountering God, precedes
the individual decision
to belong to the church.
While the church becomes
merely the setting within which
the individual religious
drama is played out.
The ecclesiastical
church is important
only as so far as the mystical
unmediated and immediate
experience of God leads
the believer to embrace it.
Modernity is modern because
the subject is at its center.
And the subject who lives
in it is introspective.
The very core of
the modern subject
is his or her
mindfulness of itself
and its realization
of its mindfulness.
It is also important to
point out that Rahner
is celebrating modernity.
And by modernity, I
will not go back to it,
but I mentioned it earlier,
the [INAUDIBLE] notion,
sociological notion,
a personal notion,
a growing separation of
realms, between the secular
and the religious, the
private and the public--
a growing respect for
individual rights,
a growing respect for
individual decision,
and making accelerated drive to
control, and to change nature.
I could go on and on.
For theologians
like Rahner-- it's
important to emphasize-- because
for theologians like Rahner,
modernity was not the barbarian
at the gate through the enemy.
It should be defeated as it had
been for so many theologians
in the 30s, 40s, and 50s
and for some recent pope's.
Modernity, for him,
was what enables
more believers than
ever to experience God
because it's only in modernity
that the personal experience
becomes the access to salvation
to belonging to the church.
To paraphrase one last time,
Loyola's spiritual exercises
are modern because they
bring about a new form
of personal subjectivity.
This is a subjectivity
in which subjection
to authority or subjugation to
authority is no longer mandated
from the outside, but is
desired from the inside.
It is a subjection that
is also a subjectivation.
Namely, one creates oneself as
a free-willing and free-choosing
subject.
At the very same time,
that one subjugates oneself
to one's voluntary decision
to follow the church
and to obey its rules.
And this is so because the
inner truth that one discovers
within the self leads
one to subjugation--
voluntary subjugation to
the external authority
of the church.
Now I just use the
term subjectivation,
a term Rahner never used.
It is in fact a term that was
coined by Michel Foucault.
So let me move now to Foucault
and to his engagement,
or spiritual exercises, within
the context of the transition
to modernity.
In the second and third volumes
of his history of sexuality
and in the lectures at
the College de France
from the late 70s
until his death,
Foucault shifted from
seeing subject as merely
being subjected to
exterior powers,
to subjects who actively
participate in the production
of their own subjugation.
His [INAUDIBLE] argued
happened in the early church,
which is between the second or
third and the fifth century.
And was due to the development
of new Christian notions
of self-hood and the
care of the self.
And I will not go into
it at this moment.
A new understanding
of the self posited
that the subject's
subjugation come from inside
from his or her
willing submission
to a superior entity.
This voluntary subjection is the
guarantee of future salvation.
Equality of free male
citizens in the classical city
was replaced now
in the early church
by subjection of the
person to the inner voice
of a transcendent authority
he or she wished to obey.
Early Christianity, Foucault's
historical reconstructions
goes on to explain, especially
in its monastic setting,
then developed techniques
of introspection
to advance self-formation that
further enhanced and embodied
these notions of inferiority
and subject-hood.
There is a truth
within the self that
can be unveiled through
exercises of truth telling,
Foucault taught.
And I'm relying a lot
on the latest collection
to be published, which
is [INAUDIBLE] lectures
that he gave in the end
of '82 beginning of '83
and were just published last
year in English and French
for the first time.
Knowledge of the self,
as Foucault explained
about the Christian tradition--
and I'm quoting-- "is
required by the fact
that the heart must
be purified in order
to understand God's word."
It can only be purified
by self-knowledge.
And God's word must
first be received for one
to then be able to undertake
purification of the heart
and to realize self-knowledge.
You have to already purify
to be able to understand,
or to acquire, God's word.
But you have to have
self-knowledge in order
to be able to acquire.
There is this circulation there.
There is a circle of
relations imploding.
There is a circle of relations
between self-knowledge,
knowledge of the truth,
which is knowledge of God,
and care of the self and of God.
Now I'm transition-- now I am
trying to connect what he says
about the early church
to early modernity--
1,000 years later.
And my argument is the regiment
that Foucault described so well
is the regiment of truth
telling and self-formation
in monastic communities
was no longer possible when
it became part of pastoral
care in late medieval
and early modern Catholicism.
There was a qualitative--
not a quantitative--
difference between the small
monastic community, communities
of religious male
virtuously and the tens
or even hundreds of
thousands of devout
lay people who
[INAUDIBLE] Medieval
and early modern Catholicism was
sought some spiritual training.
Confession to fellow
monks and to abbots
of routines of self-examination,
systematic, mutual
collaboration and spiritual
exercises of meditations
and contemplations
were the very essence
of the psychogogical
techniques of self-purification
in monasteries.
By acquiring the knowledge of
how to introspect and cultivate
one's psyche, the
practitioner reignited
his, and in some cases
her, commitment to God.
And re-enhanced his
or her subjugation
to God, and therefore another
wonderful [INAUDIBLE] paradox
subjugation to
God, and therefore
liberty from all created things.
Self-examination in the early
modern period had to offer--
now I'm, it's not
Foucault, now it's
my take on Foucault--
self-examination
in the early modern
period had offer
a version of this extremely
self-gazing way of life
that could be suitable
for much wider segments
of the population.
Spiritual and devotional
revival swept through Europe
from about 1400,
even a little before,
on from the law countries
to Bohemia, and from Italy
to England.
For these audience of men
and women, lay and clerics,
pastoral care had to
be offered that was
more systematic and methodic
yet short term and less
demanding than
monastic routines.
Spiritual exercises helped
penitence to reflect
on their acts and intentions
on their who am I-ness,
without making them turn
their backs on the world
and become priests or
monks and without having
them dedicate their entire time
to forms of self-formation.
What then were these
introspective practices
of subject formation
that enabled
this encounter with the
inner truth in their adopted
and adopted in early modern
Catholicism by the Jesuits
and by other
religious orders, who
set themselves an agenda
to form better Christians?
I'll talk about three of
them very, very briefly.
General confession was
one of these practices.
In fact, it's the only
spiritual exercise
that was an invention
of the late middle ages,
rather than adaptation of an
earlier monastic practice.
Under traditional
sacramental confession,
general confession was
not a mandatory verbal act
of penance.
It was developed by
Italian Franciscans
for the benefit of nuns
and lay devout people, who
were instructed to spend about
two weeks, every few years,
introspecting themselves and
writing down, or dictating,
more often in the case of nuns,
their entire life trajectory,
from their earliest sins,
to the goals they set
for themselves in the future.
The secret document
was then avowed
to a spiritual director,
who was often a man
other than the confessor.
It was a process
of introspecting
by means of attention,
recollection,
and truth telling.
An "authentic", I put
it in quotation marks,
an "authentic" true self was
discovered to the practitioner
through these acts
of mindfulness
and self-examination.
The discovery of
the authentic self
was to have a direct impact
on the practitioner's life.
He or she were expected
to conform themselves
to this inner truth
that they just
unveiled within themselves.
This practice of
general confession
was later extended
to the practice
of writing spiritual diaries.
This practice too was
developed mostly for women
who were required to
record each and every one
of the spiritual-- of their
spiritual experiences.
Temptations, tribulations,
doubts, fears,
and anxieties--
as well as moments
of consolation and divine love.
The untrustworthiness of
women and their inability
to control and to make sense
of the spiritual movements
necessitated close supervision.
And male and some female
spiritual directors
were assigned to
read and discern
their experiences
recorded in these diaries.
General confession and
the writing of diaries
were techniques of telling
the truth to another person.
Foucault invented a
term for this mode
of discovering and
telling the truth of self
to self by means
of verbalization
to another person.
He coined the French
neologism [INAUDIBLE].
And I will use that
English veridiction.
By so doing, Foucault
emphasizes central point
that discovering one's
truth to one's self, veri,
is never enough.
It must also be
dictated, veridiction,
pronounced spoken out, devout.
Veridiction was a training--
not only in introspective
meditations and sinfulness and
on the nature of the subject--
it was also an admission
to another person
of the deeper awareness of one's
shortcomings as the very core
of one's identity.
These practices
and verbal acts--
Foucault was right
to point out--
placed the subject in relations
of dependence with regard
to another, to a person who was
the elucidator of this truth
of the self about itself.
Finally, one preferred way
to train penitent's in acts
of recollection
and introspection
was to teach them how to
perform a methodic examination
of conscience.
This was another ancient
monastic tradition
to gain popularity in early
modern Catholic devout circles.
Practitioners were to listen
and read or read dozens or even
hundreds of questions concerning
each possible temptation
evil inclination
infraction of sin.
And the penitent was
to go through this list
of possibilities until, bingo,
finally he or she encountered
their personal culpability's
in this standardized test.
Over time, the
practitioner examines
his or her conscience--
over time the
practitioners examination
of his or her conscience was
to be memorized and routinized
to such a degree
that it could be
practiced daily, and sometimes
two or three times a day.
Loyola did it seven times a day.
In fact, he also found
time to write 3,000 letters
and do some other
things in between.
In fact, in this advanced
stage of veridiction,
the self confesses the truth
about itself to itself,
and the self plays the role
of its own spiritual director.
The self becomes the
mechanism of its own incessant
and permanent admission of
its culpability to itself.
I'm sorry-- I'm
approaching the end.
In early spiritual
exercises and meditations,
we are talking then
about the submission
of the practitioner's entire
life to self-investigation
performed by the
practitioner himself
or herself, with the guiding
listening and verifying
authority of the guide,
the spiritual director.
The technologies of
spiritual direction--
of writing diaries,
of undergoing
a general confession--
subjected a practitioner
to pastoral authority
at the same time that
they created this subject
as unique individuals.
Spiritual exercises-- especially
the examination of conscience--
were the practices for
which the individual
came to recognize himself
or herself as the subject
he or she is.
One becomes a subject
by introspecting oneself
by becoming mindful of one's
culpability's, and by sharing
these discoveries
with another person,
in order to value
both the results
of the introspective
investigation and the subject
very subjecthood.
Foucault, as I've
already mentioned,
invented the term subjectivation
to denote exactly the process
of constituting the subjectivity
of the subject himself
by avowing the
new truth of self,
and by subjugating
by subduing oneself
to the authority
of the listener.
I become free at the same
moment that I subjugate myself.
This is what he
described as the process,
and now, and I quote
him one more time--
"This is the
process that enables
us to become the subjects
who tell the truth, and who
is transfigured by these
enunciation of the truth,
by this enunciation itself."
In early modernity,
Foucault says
it is striking how important it
was for Christianity to define
each exercise in its
specificity to prescribe
the ordering of these
exercises in relation
to each other and their
temporal succession
according to the day,
week, month, year,
and also individuals' progress.
And he goes on at the
end of the 16th century,
a truly pious person's life.
And I'm not even talking about
members of seminaries or monks.
I'm talking about the
entire Catholic world,
Foucault loved to
use a bulldozer when
a spoon would have been enough.
I'll go back.
I interrupted myself, so at
the end of the 16th century,
a truly pious person's life
was literally carpeted in line
with exercises, which had to
be kept up and practiced daily
and hourly, according to times
of the day, circumstances,
moments in life,
degree of advancement,
in spiritual exercises
and so on and so on.
There were entire
manuals explaining
all the exercises you had to
do at each of these moments.
There was no moment
of life that did not
have be dabbled,
prompted, and underpinned
by a certain type of exercise.
If you take 50% of it
is accurate description,
it's still a lot.
And I'm really summarising--
Foucault went on to say this
is an extremely, an absolutely
crucial moment, in the history
of subjectivity in the West,
or in the relations between
subjectivity and truth.
When the task of obligation,
of truth telling about oneself
was inserted within the
procedure indispensable
for salvation, we think
techniques of their development
and transformation of
the subject by himself
will receive
pastoral institution.
For both Foucault
and Rahner then,
early modern spiritual
exercises are
mechanisms of creating a
new form of subjecthood,
of recognizing one's core
essence, one's true self.
It was through
introspective practices
that the subject
comes into being.
These practices give
the practitioner
the means to claim his
self, an individuality,
and an recognition of
its own uniqueness,
and its own special connections
to God in access to salvation.
But this was subjectivation into
the subjecthood that identified
at the very core of the self--
sinfulness, imperfection, and
therefore guilt and shame.
Early modern spiritual exercises
created both the ability
to claim a modern self,
but also the self-rejection
of abjugation of the self
that is being discovered.
We can say that according to
this Catholic modern sense
of self, we are
modern, in as far
as we are culpable in,
as so far as we detest
our bodies and ourselves.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks very much.
I think we have some
time for questions, so--
Yes, please.
Just a couple of questions.
One is probably a
pretty obvious question
about how do the
Protestants inherent
this heritage of a fair nation?
I think Protestantism
is often regarded
as the headliners of modernity.
So how do they
inherent this practice?
And the second question I
had was the relationship
between if you thought at
all about the relationship
between veridiction
and jurisdiction,
and whether they're
in legal practices
that you see emerging in
the modern period that
has to do with
this truth telling
of the self--
confessing, witnessing?
Great.
In a few months, Chicago UP
is publishing an amazing book
by me, exactly about these
two issues about Protestantism
and torture and the judicial
notion of truth, et cetera.
But you don't have to buy it.
I'll tell you the answers.
Protestantism-- implicit in
my entire discussion today is
the fact that almost
all of the literature--
definitely all the literature
until the '75 or even 1980.
But much of the
literature, even today,
still follows a Protestant
self-congratulating narrative
of the transition to modernity.
Just as Christianity developed
a supersecessionist's tradition
that we can't
supersede the Jews,
Protestantism did the
same to Catholicism.
We supersedes Catholicism.
Catholicism is about
ritual and exteriority,
irrationality, ritualism.
We are about interiority.
We are about modernity.
In the form of--
and this is Protestantism
on self-image,
but this is also Max Weber.
Any [INAUDIBLE]
literature, there
is really an unexamined
reputation of the Protestant
or Puritan or New
England spiritual diary
as the crucial invention
of modern subjectivity.
One of the agendas
of my entire project
is to say, hey, hey, guys,
there are women doing it already
in 1420 and 1430.
Let's see what is the
Catholic route to modernity.
So this is part
of the story too.
Protestantism comes out of late
medieval Christian traditions.
The traditions of the
monasteries were shared by--
until the split in 1517--
were shared by the people.
They were reading the
same, the mystical text.
They were reading the
same fathers of the church
and the baggage remained
the same Protestantism,
even if they were trying
to reshape it, or deal
with it differently.
And every now and then, we
see within Protestantism,
the eruption of some
form of Catholicism.
Last but not least, for example,
Loyola's Spiritual Exercises
but not only his,
Savonarola's too,
were ribalderized by
Protestant authors.
And you take Mary out, and
you publish it as Protestant.
So this is about--
so what I'm saying is
just as [INAUDIBLE]
post-colonial authors,
a few rotations
remind us about how
programmatic the term
modernity in and of itself is.
And talk about
modernity's, I want
to do the same thing for this
kind of-- within Christianity
itself, or within the West
itself-- there were modernity's
and not one modernity.
So this is one too--
confession, judicial notions
of truth-- blah, blah, blah.
Wonderful question because
for those of you who
are historian, for those
of you who are historian,
there is what is called
a confessionalism
paradigm, a confessionalism's
theory, which
argues that in both Catholic and
Protestant, different countries
and denominations, there is a
new power sharing, if you will,
agreement between the
state and the church.
And they [INAUDIBLE] the
state and church together.
They put efforts into
creating new mechanisms
of extracting truth from people
and creating obedient subjects.
I don't want to say that
it's totally untrue.
I do want to point out
that at the same time,
that the Catholic
Church is emphasizing,
more than ever
before, the importance
of confession,
sacramental confession.
There are more and
more voices that
are starting to be heard arguing
that confession by a criminal,
not by a sinner, is
extremely unreliable.
Not only because of the torture,
but this is also the beginning
of a campaign against torture.
But not only because
of torture, but also
because of insanity and because
of all kinds of other reasons.
These voices are just
starting to be heard.
But I think it's
important for the people--
especially the people
who support this
confessionalization theory--
to try to see the togetherness
of state and church
to remember that the
judicial system is
really troubled by the
reliability of confession.
The extreme example is
England never believed in it.
There was no torture in England.
Not a common law.
Last example of,
in 1614, has to be
sanctioned by the [INAUDIBLE].
By 16 something, 1616, 1617,
there's no torture in France,
so, except for--
[INAUDIBLE] in Scotland.
Except for there in
[INAUDIBLE] Scotland.
Scots use torture,
yeah, Scots use it.
So I don't want to emphasize it.
I don't want to put
too much into it.
But I do want to say that
it is not so coherent.
And it's not as pretty as some
historians have presented it.
To follow up on that as
far as, so my understanding
is that Protestant's
spiritual diaries
were written for the self--
no one else's eyes.
Hm-hm.
And often they didn't survive
because once the person died,
you got rid of them because
it was a purely personal
[INAUDIBLE].
I mean, I assume you
probably knew him
when he was in [INAUDIBLE]
working on [INAUDIBLE],
and that you're watching
your own spiritual growth.
So but this is not
necessarily mediated,
but it has to be seen by
someone else in the [INAUDIBLE]
tradition, which I
find interesting.
Now when you look at spiritual
autobiographies, which
are published, they
are often formulated?
Yeah.
They represent their journey
in a way that from sinner
to saint, or through
salvation, or whatever,
or you can't take that
necessarily at face value.
It could be embellished, or some
of it might even be made up.
So is this a tension
in your sources,
when you actually look at
what people are saying?
You say veridiction-- is
that the word you used?
Are they really
dictating the truth?
Or are they saying
what they expect
the mediator would want them to
be saying about their own sins?
Does that make [INAUDIBLE]?
Sure.
Because that is a form of social
control, possibly, isn't it?
I mean all religion is a form
of social control [INAUDIBLE]
myself.
But in a sense, it's a way
of keeping control of people
in society, to get them
to watch themselves.
So what about that?
I mean, are the people
sort of [INAUDIBLE]?
And I found some of this
in some of the work he
was doing in Germany.
People say what they expect
the person they're confessing
to that they think what
they would want to hear,
as a confessor.
So are they doing some of that?
A huge amount.
What?
A huge amount.
Yeah, I think--
There's probably [INAUDIBLE].
You're talking about
something extremely, extremely
crucial in all of this universe.
The spiritual diaries, the
autobiographical diaries
that survived, as you
say, are so formulaic.
And this is true for
manuscripts by nuns,
who knew very little
literacy as well.
They know the stories because
they hear edifying stories.
And if they can read,
they read other books.
And they want to
imitate other people.
I think it's true for the
Protestants, the Puritan,
and Catholic traditions
to the same degree.
And it's also true for
the person who allegedly
is writing only for himself,
and then using the [INAUDIBLE]
in order to destroy
towards the end of life.
Even this is very formulaic.
And we have enough examples
to know how formulaic it is.
But my point is, so what?
The most personalized
experiences
we have are formulaic.
When you read
descriptions of really
wild mystical experiences, that
are not formulaic allegedly,
they're extremely formulaic.
Satan is green.
God is never green.
Why?
What prevents me from
seeing God as green?
But God never appears as green.
What I'm trying to say we absorb
all of these universal coded
messages that whether
we write it down,
or we don't write it down,
even if it is the most
authentic experience,
it is filtered
through such a long
tradition that it's
impossible to, I think,
tell what is authenticity.
And, therefore, we might use
discovering an authentic--
I always put quotation
mark around it
because I don't know
enough to do it.
But, yes, to read
spiritual diaries
of late, medieval
and early modern nuns
is tedious because they all
have the same temptations
and the same tribulations
and [INAUDIBLE]
all of the same anxieties,
and the same fears.
But when they have
moments of consolations,
the consolations always
also look the same.
Don't forget, even
this is a project
I worked on before
when I was here.
Don't forget that
if you really have
weird different
experiences, you end up
being regarded as either
possessed or crazy.
It's safe to have
boring experiences than
to have unboring experiences.
This is actually something
that I have no idea what
happens in other traditions.
But it would be interesting to
think about it comparatively.
How wild are other?
Because from the little
I know about Hinduism,
it's so much wilder than
the Christian tradition
in terms of fluidity of animal
and human, gender sexes.
So many things that the
West really doesn't imagine.
And if it imagines it,
it imagines it in Hell.
In Hell, there are weird things.
From the little
I've seen, India,
weird things are
all over the place--
not only in the demonic part
of the religious tradition.
I'm not even sure the
category demonic and divine
operates in the same way.
But this is for other people
to think about, not for me.
Yeah.
Jennifer.
I have a question
about the crazy people.
The crazy people that
you just referenced.
Actually, because
the relationship
between Catholicism
and psychiatry
has been very troubled
for a long time.
And yet, some historians,
myself included,
would claim that the
first recognizably modern
institutions for the mad are
founded in early modern Spain
under the [INAUDIBLE]
of monks, who
are participating in
the kinds of practices
that you're describing.
And so I guess my question
is about the relationship
between inner truth
and outer truth,
and why it would be that
often people carry it
if the mad are no longer seen
as privileged vessels that
are channeling
the divine, why it
would be a group of monks
in early modern [INAUDIBLE]
who might be at the forefront
of thinking about that
and providing them for them,
in that a bunch of secular
Frenchman, Englishmen
believe 18th century,
as even Foucault himself
in some ways argues?
Yeah, I think that we have to
put Foucault's sort of madness,
what's the [INAUDIBLE] title?
I don't remember.
Decide never to
assign it to students
and not to use it as historians.
It's a collection
of brilliant totally
unsubstantiated
assumptions about how
medieval society operated.
The insane are
kept in monasteries
and in homes in chains
throughout the Middle Ages.
The insanes are not
floating down the rivers
and having a cafe under the
tree or cognac under the tree--
or whatever it is
that he's describing--
and then one day, they're
confined to, blah, blah, blah.
They're still debating
what he actually said.
What?
Whether it was real, or whether
it was a myth or whatever.
The ship of fools on the rivers.
Was it real?
I think that that
what is happening
is that there is an attempt
to define boundaries.
You are taking me way, way
away from my comfort zone.
There is new attempts of defined
boundaries between the rational
and the irrational, or
the sane or the crazy,
that they're opening
in a number of places
in Western Europe in the
15th and 16th century.
And I think that within
a context of really
the civil wars and tensions
and fights over recruits
and conversion, the
fighting religions
define rigid boundaries
of what is permissible
and not permissible.
And within these
religious experiences,
that would have been tolerated.
They would have been
weird even before,
but would have been tolerated--
become less and less tolerated.
And I think his
name is [INAUDIBLE]
was a guy, who would
have found himself
in a very nice company
of lots of other people
in a [INAUDIBLE] city-state
in the Middle Ages.
But [INAUDIBLE], he's expelled
from his French Jesuit house.
And he moves to Holland,
and he becomes a Calvinist.
And he is expelled from Holland
because he's a weird Calvinist.
And he moves to Germany.
And he becomes a
bohemian brother.
Then they expel him, and
he moves to somewhere else,
and he establishes his own sect.
And then a member
of his own sect
expel him because
he's so strange.
So there's no longer
space for this kind
of people [INAUDIBLE].
But it is very general.
I do think that the
attempt to create
new boundaries between
sanity and insanity
is a major effort
that has taken place.
And I do wonder if it's
unrelated but it is related.
Because when we are
talking about meditation,
we have two big books
about meditation.
One is this one.
But the other one is for
another Jesuit, which
is [INAUDIBLE] of the Jesuit.
And his collection of meditation
and his entire legitimacy
to the creation of the
modern self, for him,
it's a different
setting than mine.
He is doing what I
was talking about.
He's doing introspection.
He's doing creation
of modern self.
For him, everything depends upon
his own decision about himself
that is not crazy.
Because he says,
how do I know that I
think therefore I am because
I know that I'm not crazy?
But you can be crazy, and you
think that you know that you.
The moment we disagree with
him that he is not crazy,
all of these huge Cartesian
thinking collapses.
So the definition of what is
craziness and what is sanity
is really crucial this
historical moment.
I'm meditating on your problem.
You're using terms like mystical
experience and mystical.
And I'm wondering how-- and
there's a whole debate how
to define mystical
and mysticism--
what it entails.
In this context, how
are you using mystical?
And in this context, is
only what Loyola experienced
mystical and what the spiritual
diaries. are talking about not
mystical.
And what is the differentiating
factor between the two?
And how about revelation?
You differentiated earlier
between [INAUDIBLE]
and revelation.
Revelation in the
source of connection
with oneself and with the church
are all revelations-- mystical
and [INAUDIBLE], are they--
are some mystical, some not?
Yeah.
Good, you know better than I do.
It's really impossible to try
to define all of these things.
No, for me, I
don't differentiate
between big mystics
and little mystics.
I think that someone who has an
interesting dream in which God
talks to them, it's as good
as a mystical experience.
So when a woman, a nun,
or even a lay woman
says, and then I
felt sweetness, I
was overwhelmed by sweetness,
that's a mystical--
a spiritual experience.
I don't know I don't
know how to differentiate
between a spiritual
experience and mysticism.
I'm not sure I want to.
But I do want to point
out that in this moment
in Christianity-- and I do not
know about other traditions--
a division is being
made between two forms
of mystical experiences.
Those that appear by
themselves, and those
that are acquired that you--
to cultivate--
you teach yourself
to take the preconditions
for them to appear.
In a way, you're
challenging God.
If I do A, you'll give me B. So
within the Catholic tradition
itself, it's a moment
of trying to figure out
these two ways of having
these kind of experiences.
Now I feel very uncomfortable
with all of this language.
And you said something about
people who are practicing
first-person--
that you guys are
trying to negotiate
the first and third
person, which is wonderful.
I am a third-person person.
Totally third-person person.
This contrasting emerges in
Japanese Buddhism circles
about types of religions,
types of Buddhists,
are liberation through
self-power and liberation
through other power.
Other power, you don't
really have to do anything
to prepare yourself at all.
It will just come .
And self-power is you
actually work and work
and work and work.
But then the lines start to
blur because you work and work
and get to the point
where, well, then
does other power then take
over at a certain point?
Right.
And I mean they really--
they're grappling a
similar kinds of issues.
Same thing.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Because it really is--
I just summarize
thousands and thousands
of pages of different
theologians negotiating
these kind of things.
And there is something
there could be something
problematic about it because
there is a place in which--
and they say it.
We can laugh about it.
But they are worried
about the fact
that maybe it is
challenging God.
Because you're saying,
I gave you everything.
How dare you not show up?
Maybe it's inappropriate.
Yeah.
It's been awhile since I've
read the Spiritual Exercises.
I remember there were
a lot of contemplations
of sort of God's grace.
But I also remember
a fair amount
of concentrations of sort
of the torments of Hell.
And you mentioned just sort of
how far it had sort of spread.
And I'm pondering if you think--
I know we talked about
torture sort of falling apart
eventually by the mid-1600s--
but it certainly was alive
and well for about 150 years
before that.
We start at the 1500s--
particularly in more
trials and heresy.
And I wonder
specifically if you think
that even in the later
Protestant areas, where you had
sort of these witch
crazes, things like that,
do you think that
Loyola's work had anything
to do with, perhaps, some
of their perceptions of Hell
and torment?
Or do you think it
might not have gone out
that far yet, like it
hadn't spread to them
stuck [INAUDIBLE]?
Or do you think like the
theoretical, lay preacher
out in the country might have
read a few and got some ideas?
Yeah, that question, I
don't know the answer.
I will think with the--
I think that the representations
of Hell, descriptions of Hell,
the traditions of Hell
are so widespread--
come from so many sources--
that I'm not sure
how to quantify
what is Loyola's
contribution, as opposed
to somebody else's contribution.
Again, because at
the end of the day,
there is absolutely
nothing original
in Loyola's collection.
A collection all
of his meditations
had been practiced by
[INAUDIBLE] in the law
countries, and
some in Benedictine
monasteries in Spain.
So he collects all
kinds of places
and puts them all together.
There is no--
I'm not a Jesuit.
I can tell the truth.
There is nothing original there.
The systematization is unique,
but the meditation's themself,
they're old.
If there are no other questions,
please join me in [INAUDIBLE].
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
