#pickstock

"In the beginning of these considerations on the place of political philosophy in the structure of reality, I cited (...) a passage from Leo Strauss in which he pointed out that of its very nature, the city looks not to laws that it can unmake but to those it cannot, because man did not make himself to be man. The city must transcend itself, or perhaps better, the substantial beings among whom the city is a relation have ends that go through and beyond the political. In a further passage, I cited Catherine Pickstock, in a remarkable book pointing to, as she puts it in her sub-title, the "liturgical consummation of philosophy" (...) Pickstock intimates that human consciousness cannot be guaranteed by ideological constructs or by "autonomous self-pressence", the only alternatives available in an "immanentist" world, as she puts it. It can be grounded only by a "redemptive" return of "doxological dispossession", caused by a proper human response to the transcendent, a response that implies that man does not "make" his own salvation".

First of all, the liturgical relativises the everyday without denying its value. Personal joys are not allowed to become over-inflated because they are placed within the context of collective enjoyment and are seen as but specific manifestations of a continuous collective celebration. Inversely, personal sorrows are shared with others and are viewed in the context of cosmic patterns which include such tragic eventualities. The pattern itself will in various ways allow the individual to see his sorrow as redeemed and transfigured. By contrast, a modern individual may alternate between seeking refuge from public misery in private delight, or escaping personal sorrow through absorption in the impersonal world of the media. But in neither case do the public and the private mediate each other in a liturgical fashion: they remain, to use Gillian Rose's favourite word, dirempted. And from this situation, inevitably, various pathologies must ensue. People cannot readily live with themselves and in public at the same time. But this co-dwelling is exactly what liturgy renders possible.