A Crisis of Particularity - Part 1
By Nic Paton, taken from Sound and Silence:
Love all creation. The whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, and every ray of light. —Dostoevsky
Particularity is not an often-used word. But it is one which has recently come into my awareness, and with a little reflection, has begun offering green shoots of hope in a world overrun by the global, the universal, and the general. The disconnection we experience as a result has at root, I believe, everything to do with a loss of intimate relationship with the particular.
And its use is not new. Christian mystics in the middle ages held particularity in high regard, but in the world following the reformation, in what might be termed the Modern Era, its use was lost. And this loss is felt keenly at present, especially amongst those who view themselves as moving beyond modernity.
To introduce the problem, let us consider the way that this modern era has given us the notion of “Objectivity” as a way of knowing. Or more specifically, how it has created the myth of Scientific Objectivity as the prime way of knowing. While the Age of Reason has gifted us with this, it has also come with a price. It’s a good thing to think big, think clearly, and think impartially, and in terms of a whole.
But the price is that Objectivity has become a pernicious myth, which is not only self-contradictory, but has served to eliminate other ways of knowing. In brief, it is contradictory because it cannot escape its own gravity: the belief that the objective is a superior (or the only) way of knowing what is true, is in itself a subjective belief.
The downside of this myth is that other approaches to truth, the personal, the emotional, the traditional, the individual or imaginative for example, are sidelined, if not vilified. Where we apply this thinking to theology, “correct” ways of biblical interpretation (almost always handed to us from an authority above), create heretical no-go areas and taboos within communities, which leave little space for questioning, doubt, or personal exploration. Inevitably, at time of crisis, individuals who cannot in good conscience “tow the line” are given an ultimatum: Our way, or the highway. This is usually in the name of a larger truth, to which the subtleties of the individual and their particular circumstances must submit.
Put another way, the particular has, under the modern consensus, been ousted by the general. The individual by the prevailing orthodoxy, the creative by the correct, and the emerging by the entrenched. Take away the particular and you are left with concepts rather than relationship, abstraction rather than intimacy, and knowledge in place of wisdom.
However, the crisis of the particular vs. the general ranges far wider than just epistemology, the problem of knowing. It is an intrinsic part of our culture and worldview at this time of globalisation.
This is part one of a three-part article:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Nic Paton—Postmodern Liturgist, multi-instrumentalist, VJ, and scullery theologian—lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and contributes to Emerging Africa.
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Welcome to the Reader's Forum
Brian – a nice take on the topic.
When logics dominate encounters, risks and adventures, ossification sets in and its downhill from there. Only the inbreaking of Life from outside these domains is going to give life.
Do you see “particularity” as a factor in the renewals and reformations of the past?
Perhaps, at least insofar as the important spiritual turning points have occurred when a relative handful of people have been led to create a new understanding of what Christian faith means for their particular time, place, and culture. They go back to the sources, and the Source, and create a new Christianity that makes sense to them and the people around them.
But the new movements can stumble in so many ways—they can become not only familiar enough to make sense to a people, but so familiar that they echo the prejudices and fears of that people. And the class of leaders and symbol manipulators they put in power to manage their movement can so easily create a new “Orthodoxy” that becomes a substitute for love (of God, of one another, of the outsider). Then, as you say, things go downhill from there.
As I was reading this article and trying to grasp what Knight was meaning about the crisis of the particular, I kept thinking about the schism between the church and the world. There is a sense in which life in the church begins to look like the life of abstract concepts and ideals where the “particularities” of the secular world get forgotten and where we ordain the church world to be the better place.
As an example, while I consider the missional church movement to be a significant development, when I have been in church conferences that talk about missional, there is the tendency to assume that missional is not happening in the churches. What is forgotten is a theology of the disbursed community, a theology of individual church members—the particularities, if you will—who treat church as something of a place to receive energy so that they can go out into the world and do the work of mission in their banks, restaurants, hospitals, shopping malls where they work and play. Despite my profound appreciation for the missional church movement and for its implicit assumption that the church should serve as the kingdom of God in the world, I find it rather disingenuous for church leaders to be urging churches to do mission work without any recognition of the saints who surround us!
Just to clarify, Jeff #4, I just posted this. The author is Nic Paton from South Africa. ;-)
Thanks for commenting!
If I am hearing you correctly, Jeff, you are understanding particularity as detail, specifically the details of the world, which are forgotton by the church because of its abstraction?
The abstraction in my thinking is a problem for all in “world” and “church” alike. I am sugesting that as part of mission and witness, redemption implies to be brought back to the particular via Incarnation.
Brian
Indeed, every new movement is faced with this challenge, and we can’t shy away from it.
I think of Wimber declaring that his movement needed to disband or reform (don’t have the details of his words) after the generation it was built to serve has passed.
Best thing is to identify the challenges and understand the risks to the best of our ability.
This is a conundrum of success (thanks to Scott Peck) common to all human endeavour:
– Discipline produces abundance – Abundance breeds laxity – Laxity undermines disciplineAdd Emergent Village to
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Hi Nic,
Fun stuff!
As a Church Historian, I’d say one way that Modern folk operate is by using a particular body of theory and a particular set of concepts to make pronouncements over a particular slice of reality. Aside from the much bemoaned slicing and dicing of the world and our lives that this entails, the effect is to create “domains” of knowledge where one or two dominant “logics” are taken as providing that definitive and objective knowing that you wrote about.
One side effect is that people actually come to believe in the “reality” of the abstractions they employ as fluent users of the accepted logic that rules that domain. And that leaves them with precious little need to encounter the “particularities” that you are championing.