Let's begin with "person." Following Tournier (The Meaning of Persons) I see a person as essentially dyadic instead of monadic. "Dyadic" means a person's selfhood is constructed essentially in relationship with others, "monadic" means a person's selfhood is essentially constructed within a person apart from relationships with others. This are gross definitions, for sure. In biblical times (and still in the Mediterranean today), however, a person's identity was primarily dyadic, with one's family/kin group being existentially before oneself: one was a member of a group first, then an individual second. Indeed, much of the talk of sinfulness in the scriptures derives from placing oneself before one's group.
Yet we cannot escape the fact that we are persons, with interior identities that persist regardless of our primary and secondary groups. Tournier therefore distinguishes between "person" and "persona" - the former denoting our essential interiority, the latter an exteriority in negotiation (or dialogue) with our groups. An enduring human characteristic - becoming painfully apparent in adolescence but persisting throughout our adult lives - is to try and reconcile how one understands one's person with how one's group understands one's persona(s). "You don't know me at all!" is a common protest in this regard. This protest should not be seen as a monadic cry for clarity; rather, it's a further step in a dyadic dialogue of identity. "You don't know me at all, and the way you know me shapes who I am, so let's discuss" is the extension of this protest. So I tend to see a person as dyadically engaged in a persistent conversation about and redefinition of that person's group persona within a specific group. Please note, dyadism implies that it takes just two to make a group: pair-bonds (spouses, partners, mates) are the classic example. But please note also: "person" seems to me to be withdrawn one step from the dynamic I'm trying to discuss, so perhaps I should clarify and define this trialectic as that between persona, group and God.
Turning to groups, groups are composed of persons, always. Groups range from the ad hoc to the historical: in the former, a group may exist momentarily for a very simple purpose. Consider this photo: one of our Israel pilgrimage group, Michiel, happened to be near a small, apparently related group of tourists at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. For some reason, they invited him to join them in a photo.
So Michiel, whom I found to have such an open and warm persona, stepped right into frame and wrapped his arm around the nearest stranger. And they formed a group, right then and there, for about 90 seconds. "Open" and "warm" are characteristics of Michiel's persona in my experience, but surely stem from his person. However, as characteristics of his persona in this instance (and they could well be characteristics of a person and not be characteristics of her or his personas), his open warmness was welcomed and affirmed by this small tour group, making him, for the moment, one of theirs and they some of his. In human ethological terms, the open-torsoed arm hug is a classic marker of non-hostility and, actually, malleability: Michiel and the tourists understood the parameters of this photo opportunity - warmth, openness and togetherness for this brief moment (though note the man Michiel hugs is looking down and away, a distancing move) - and were willing to cooperate, hence, were malleable.Now, think about this small group of tourists as a subgroup of a much larger group, their individual and collective kin-groups, friends, co-workers, synagogues, etc. They're having this picture taken to take back and show to someone (usually, and surely in this case). So I imagine it fits their own personas in relation to those groups to show the folks back home how warm and welcoming and affirming their trip to Israel was, so much so that they found a "kindred soul" in Michiel, who graciously stepped into the photo with them. Those groups back home represent more historical groups, groups that have persisted for a significant (and you can certainly argue with me about what "significant" signifies) time. Surely we can speculate that this five-person group includes two sets of old-marrieds (perhaps the woman in the center is a widow, or her partner is taking the photo) with extended families back home. Perhaps the two couples are related to each other, too. So we're beginning to get an historical sense of their kinship groups, perhaps children and grandchildren, cousins, but also fellow workers, bridge groups, aerobic groups, etc. Further, if I remember correctly they were all Jewish, which extends our discussion of group to ethnicity, perhaps the most persistent historically of groups (paleo-anthropological definitions transcend the historical, but you could also begin to discuss homo sapiens sapiens here). So depending on how one slices one's pie, these persons are parts of groups that range from the ad hoc (the photo session) to the generational (their marriages) to the ethnic (Jewishness). And be sure that each person has to negotiate her or his persona with each and all of these groups.
And just like the person/persona dilemma, groups have their own membership/ethos dilemma. For a group to persist, it has to welcome new members. On welcoming new members, the group brings to bear aggressive dynamics to ensure that the new members will conform to and support group norms, practices, rules - in short, its ethos. Yet new members bring newness to the group, and some of these members will be found to be more beneficial/effective in group-building and -sustaining processes, perhaps in ways the group did not recognize nor anticipate. Hence, members who become prominent begin to alter the group's ethos, leading to a similar dynamic to the person/persona dilemma: "Who are we?" becomes a characteristic query. "What are we doing together?" another. "Why are we here?" a third. So we can easily visualize an inter-group dialectic about identity and purpose, e.g., ethos. But the concept of being "beneficial" or "effective" actually has an extra-group referent: groups always function in wider economies, and beneficial effects are those that help a group to grow and prosper in light of those external realities. So one can see a group as nested in ever-growing and -intersecting larger groups, with which a group is constantly negotiating its own sense of identity and purpose, again, its ethos. So perhaps we should modify my trialectic further, and speak of persona, ethos (which assumes group) and God, with ethos being the negotiated result of two or more personas.
It's tempting to stop with this fundamental, dyadic dialectic, but since this is a discussion of Spirituality, we have to extend our discussion to the divine and speak about a trialectic of persona, ethos and God. Imagine, if you will, a two-dimensional persona/ethos snapshot of overlapping circles: perhaps the persona circle is entirely contained within the ethos circle, perhaps only slightly overlapping (I will complicate this simple diagram in the future, but for our purposes it's best to keep it simple). Just like in the classic book Flatland, these two circles have permeable boundaries, allowing them to interact, but they are essentially two-dimensional. God, in this diagram, can be characterized by a solid sphere, three dimensional, that intersects these two-dimensional circles. In other words, God is much more complex (deeper, wider, but also fuller) than we and our ethoi are. And I tend to think of the divine irrupting, not necessarily in a sense of penetrating from the outside, but also in a sense of swelling from within. Where God penetrates/swells with the persona/ethos dyad, there you have the persona/ethos/God triad. To read and think about the conversation surrounding that triad - the narrative, always reflective, that seeks to process and make sensible that triadic interaction - is what I mean when I speak of a "trialectic."
Now, you may protest that I've moved my discussion from hard, empirical realities like person and group to "softer" realities like persona and ethos. You would be right. Because what I'm interested in is not investigating biology or anthropology but in reading narratives. And narratives grow not out of an analysis of biology and anthropology, but out of the vital interaction between personas and ethoi. In narratives, persons and groups are mediated through their respective personas and ethoi to such an extent that the former are irretrievable: all we have to go on, in reading scripture or in making sense of our relationships, are narratives that derive from our personas' interactions with different ethoi. In my next post I will begin to discuss the differences at the persona and ethos levels between Spirit and spirit. Hopefully, we'll be able to see ways to distinguish, associate and combine the two that helps us make sense of this trialectic in terms of applying it usefully to our lives. Throughout this elaborate post has run an essential (for me) question: how do we know when God is present? And part of that knowing, a crucial part in my humble opinion, is how we distinguish the Spirit from the spirits. Or to be more precise, what are the narrative cues - both presently and historically - the we can read accurately or faithfully to know God's presence. Thank you for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment