Imagining the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies)

How Worship Works

Smith, James K. A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441240538
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

2013 Word Guild Award (Academic) How does worship work? How exactly does liturgical formation shape us? What are the dynamics of such transformation? In the second of James K. A. Smith's three-volume theology of culture, the author expands and deepens the analysis of cultural liturgies and Christian worship he developed in his well-received Desiring the Kingdom. He helps us understand and appreciate the bodily basis of habit formation and how liturgical formation--both "secular" and Christian--affects our fundamental orientation to the world. Worship "works" by leveraging our bodies to transform our imagination, and it does this through stories we understand on a register that is closer to body than mind. This has critical implications for how we think about Christian formation. Professors and students will welcome this work as will pastors, worship leaders, and Christian educators. The book includes analyses of popular films, novels, and other cultural phenomena, such as The King's Speech, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Facebook.

PART 1


Incarnate Significance

THE BODY AS BACKGROUND

A liturgical anthropology is rooted in both a kinaesthetics and a poetics—an appreciation for the “bodily basis of meaning” (kinaesthetics) and a recognition that it is precisely this bodily comportment that primes us to be oriented by story, by the imagination (poetics). In part 1 we’ll undertake introductory expositions of two key theorists of embodied intentionality: phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and social theorist Pierre Bourdieu. Their work provides a theoretical toolbox and conceptual lexicon to help us name and describe the dynamics of habit formation, giving us insight into the nature of liturgical formation more specifically. By helping us to imagine human nature differently, they will also lead us to a theoretical appreciation for the primacy of the imagination.

1
Erotic Comprehension

Affect . . . is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations.[64]

Perceiving (by) Stories

Much of our action is not the fruit of conscious deliberation; instead, much of what we do grows out of our passional orientation to the world—affected by all the ways we’ve been primed to perceive the world.[65] In short, our action emerges from how we imagine the world.[66] What we do is driven by who we are, by the kind of person we have become. And that shaping of our character is, to a great extent, the effect of stories that have captivated us, that have sunk into our bones—stories that “picture” what we think life is about, what constitutes “the good life.” We live into the stories we’ve absorbed; we become characters in the drama that has captivated us. Thus, much of our action is acting out a kind of script that has unconsciously captured our imaginations. And such stories capture our imagination precisely because narrative trains our emotions, and those emotions actually condition our perception of the world. Here we need to appreciate the recent insights of cognitive science and neuroscience, which then help us see the importance of the imagination and story.

We are not disembodied choice machines who somehow end up in bodies that are embedded in a material milieu. No, we are actors, doers, engaged makers and muddlers in a material world that is our home, our environment, our milieu, our dwelling. A nuanced liturgical anthropology will need to displace the functional intellectualism that tends to dominate both philosophical accounts of agency and our everyday “folk” conceptions of choice and action. Even those Christian communities we usually criticize for their anti-intellectualism are, in fact, intellectualist in their implicit philosophies of action insofar as they believe that changing what we think will change what we do.[67] But what if we are actors before we are thinkers? What if our action is driven and generated less by what we think and more by what we love? And what if those loves are formed on a register that hums along largely below the radar of consciousness—but are nonetheless acquired products of formation and not mere aspects of “hardwiring”? Then any adequate account of Christian formation and discipleship—and hence any holistic vision for Christian education—will need to appreciate the dynamics of habituation that make us the sorts of actors we are. This book aims to articulate a Christian philosophy of action that takes seriously the creational[68] conditions of human action: our embodiment, our finitude, our sociality, and the complexity of our being-in-the-world—the different ways that we “intend” our world. At the heart of my argument is the conviction that our incarnating, accommodating God meets us in and through these creaturely conditions. Just as God’s revelation accommodates itself to the hermeneutical conditions of our finitude, so the transforming Spirit of God meets us as the finite creatures of habit we are. The sanctifying Spirit condescends to meet us as narrative, imaginative, ritual animals, giving us practices and liturgies for our sanctification.

In doing so, I’m pushing back against an “intellectualist” account of action that assumes that what I do is the outcome of what I think.[69] On this intellectualist account, I see a situation, consider my options, think through my obligations and the range of possible consequences, and then make a conscious choice to act as the outcome of that mental deliberation. Action, on this picture, is a conclusion to a deliberative, mental, rational process.

The problem is, we now know that very little of our action and behavior is generated in this way. A root problem of this intellectualist account of action is that it assumes that “seeing” and “evaluating” are two separate processes. In other words, it assumes that we first see the “facts” of the case, deliberate about the relevant “moral” principles that apply, and then make a choice, resulting in action. But in fact, perception and evaluation are inextricably intertwined: as soon as I take in a scene, before I “think” about it, I’ve already evaluated it on the basis of predispositions I bring to the situation. Perception is already an evaluation that then primes me to act in certain ways, depending on the formation of my character and my “passional orientation.” In his important book The Social Animal, David Brooks summarizes it this way:

Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes, they are linked and basically simultaneous. The research of the past thirty years suggests that some people have taught themselves to perceive more skillfully than others. The person with good character has taught herself, or been taught by those around her, to see situations in the right way. When she sees something in the right way, she’s rigged the game. She’s triggered a whole network of unconscious judgments and responses in her mind, biasing her to act in a certain manner.[70]

Our intellectualist bias leads us to misunderstand the nature of action, including ethical action. We tend to assume that “educating for action” requires first uploading the relevant rules and axioms into our minds, then equipping agents with the critical thinking skills that will allow them to amass the relevant facts of a situation and then make the right decision—either for individual action or as a matter of policy. We then pose a question or quandary: for example, what should be done about the plight of poor urban schools? But what this intellectualist paradigm misses is the fact that we never simply perceive the so-called facts of the matter, nor do we act out principles and axioms in any straightforward, deductive way. It can’t be a matter of first getting “the facts”; nor is it just a matter of knowing how to consciously apply relevant moral rules. As soon as the situation is perceived, there is already an evaluation that has occurred—a priming of our posture and stance toward the situation. As soon as I become acquainted with the situation of urban public education, I will have already been primed to see a whole world there. I “take in” a whole situation that is governed and shaped by affective dispositions I bring to the encounter. “One’s feelings are not a reaction to, or a superposition on, one’s cognitive assessment,” McGilchrist notes, “but the reverse: the affect comes first, the thinking later. Some fascinating research confirms that affective judgment is not dependent on the outcome of a cognitive process.”[71] Affect and emotion are part of the “background” I bring with me that constitutes the situation as a certain kind of situation. Thus McGilchrist defines affect not merely as discrete emotions but as “a way of attending to the world (or not attending to it), a way of relating to the world (or not relating to it), a stance, a disposition, towards the world—ultimately a ‘way of being’ in the world.”[72] This is because of the primacy of bodily perception, what Mark Johnson will call “the bodily basis of meaning”: the fact that our bodies mean the world in ways that are intentional without being intellectual. “The essential core of being is subcortical,” as McGilchrist provocatively summarizes. “Emotion and the body are at the irreducible core of experience: they are not there merely to help out with cognition. Feeling is not just an add-on, a flavoured coating for thought: it is at the heart of our being, and reason emanates from that central core of the emotions, in an attempt to limit and direct them, rather than the other way about.”[73] The whole person perceives and interprets the world, and the specific shape of our material embodiment plays a significant role in that.

To “take it in” as a situation is to already feel and sense different sorts of calls or obligations woven into the situation itself. In other words, what I feel called to do in and about such a situation is not dictated by principles that transcend the situation but rather by elicitations that are experienced as immanent to the situation. The situation as perceived already comes loaded (or not) with a call upon me. The call I feel in such a situation, even if it is experienced as “obvious,” can be radically different for someone who has had different affective “training.” So in the case of urban public schools, one person will immediately and “obviously” see the situation as calling for discipline—for policies that are meant to fight the laziness that characterizes the “culture of poverty” while exercising “stewardship” of public resources. Another person will “just see” the dynamics of disenfranchisement and the systemic oppression that generates such an oppression, feeling a call to take up the work of individual empowerment and systemic policy change. Any “facts” will already be seen in light of the affective background each brings to the situation.[74]

One can begin to appreciate how this also plays out on a larger level: What is this world we inhabit? Whose world is this? Who is my neighbor? Am I my brother’s keeper? These are all questions that are implicitly answered in our affective take on the world—a construal of the world that is governed by our “emotional” training as much as (or really, more than, or at least before) it is governed by the information deposited in the intellect. Even to frame these as implicit “answers” to implicit “questions” is already to pose the matter too didactically. Instead, we should say that we have a “feel” for the world that is informed by stories that dispose us to inhabit the world as either a bounteous but broken gift of the gracious Creator or a closed system of scarcity and competition; and as a result, either I will just “naturally” be disposed to see others as neighbors, as image-bearers of God, whose very faces call to me in a way that is transcendent, or I will have a “take” on others as competitors, threats, impositions on my autonomy. That affective, emotional “background” is also part of the dispositions or tendencies that I bring to such a context. I’m not only primed to see the situation in a certain way, based on this emotional context; I’m also already inclined or disposed to act in a certain way—not as the result of a decision but as a sort of “natural” tendency given the inclinations that I’ve acquired, the habits that already prime me to “lean” in certain directions.

So generating good, just, virtuous action is not merely a matter of disseminating the relevant rules or principles;[75] it is more fundamentally dependent upon training affect—training people to “see situations in the right way.” That, it turns out, requires training their emotions to be primed to take in and evaluate situations well. Our emotional perceptual apparatus (which I’m linking to “the imagination”) is significantly “trained” by narrative. I will have implicitly and affectively absorbed stories and narratives and pictures about the situation of urban public education and will have learned to tell myself stories about poverty or race or secularity. I will have emotionally absorbed those stories from NPR or Fox News or (just maybe!) the testimonies of others or firsthand encounters. Even my firsthand encounters will be primed and positioned by the sorts of stories I’ve absorbed, so that I already enter this space and this conversation with a “take” that I’ve probably never articulated to myself. And such “storied” pedogogy, we’ll see, is intimately linked to our embodiment.

This interplay is well described by Mark Johnson who emphasizes that the emotions are a mode of both internal assessment and external appraisal.[76] So “the major neuroscientists agree that emotions play a central role in an organism’s assessment of its internal milieu” (MB 54), which, in turn, is crucial for governing our bodily interaction with an environment. On the one hand, my body emotionally “knows” threats before I’m ever aware of them, for e...