The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul. Eric McLuhan

communis, an obscure artifact of Aristotelian philosophy and medieval theology, has quietly invaded the unsuspecting contemporary world disguised as synesthesia. The poets, and the blind, have much to offer us on its account, so they contribute a few insights to our discussion. The senses we discuss are multifarious: there are the five bodily senses, and the intellectual senses of Scripture that de Lubac discusses, as well as the theological senses (the theological virtues of faith, hope, charity). Meanwhile, each group, we discover, has its own sensus communis, and the three groups are in communion with one another.

      Modern media exert a profound, destabilizing effect on the sensus communis and on the interrelation of the various senses; consequently, we turn in these pages to a consideration of the importance and significance of the body. The meaning of the human body cannot be overstated, as John Paul II shows in depth in his seminal Man and Woman He Created them: A Theology of the Body: the body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state that has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning, significance, and experience of the body are utterly transformed and distorted.

      Before we can take steps to counteract the influence of our technologies on our senses, we must investigate how they bring their influence to bear and what can be done about that. On the one hand, the arts may hold a significant part of the answer; on the other, an increased emphasis on participation in the sacraments would go a long way toward rectifying matters.

      It is time to bring forward a Catholic theory of communication¹ that takes into account the transformation of the users of media.

Eric McLuhan Bloomfield, Ontario, 2013-2015

      Faith

      “Anyone wishing to follow reason alone would be a confirmed lunatic in the opinion of the greater part of the world” (Pascal). Anyone wishing to follow faith alone is liable to be a confirmed heretic for many people—so little do the standards of judgment of many men, seemingly the most jealous of orthodoxy, partake of the order of faith.

      Anyone wishing, in what concerns faith, to be guided by faith alone, must in any case be prepared to walk alone.

      But his solitude is only apparent. It is a solitude filled with invisible presences. It is the painful condition of the deepest and purest communion.

      --Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith

      Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit,² that is, a kind of revelation. St. Thomas wrote, “Faith must needs be from God. Because those things which are of faith surpass human reason, hence they do not come to man’s knowledge, unless God reveal them. To some, indeed, they are revealed by God immediately, as those things which were revealed to the apostles and prophets...”³ Faith, then, provides knowledge.

      The starting point of Christian experience is faith. Faith is not replaced by experience, but it remains the comprehensive form of Christian experience. This is the first point to be made about Christian experience, as Wojtyla understands it: its origin and measure lies in faith, not the other way around. Faith must be “enriched,” that is, it must become more mature and conscious, able to form the whole of experience. “Faith and the enrichment of faith is a supernatural gift from God and is not subject to human planning or causation; but man, and the church as a human community, can and must cooperate with the grace of faith and contribute to its enrichment.^{4, 5}

      I have always understood faith to be “a way of knowing”: another sense, not one of touch & co., but nonetheless one by which you simply know certain things, analogous to how you know that something is coarse or smooth, or loud, or bright, or sweet, or stinks.

      Faith, then, is NOT opinion, and it is not belief (in the common, loose sense), though we often use these terms casually to refer to it. Belief and opinion are things we decide to have. “Believe” can mean several things. At one end of the spectrum there is “I believe that it will rain tomorrow” and also “I believe that astronauts did land on the moon, and that nobody faked the whole thing in the Arizona desert” at the other end there is the “believe” in “Credo in unum deum, patrem omnipotentem...” which is decidedly close to the idea of faith, if not synonymous with it. Still, faith is not a decision but a knowing, a kind of perception and knowledge given to or through the soul; it uses the soul as a sense modality, a medium of communication. “Only faith enables us to experience the salvific presence of God in Christ in the very center of life and of history. Faith alone reveals to us the meaning of the human condition and our supreme dignity as sons and daughters of God who are called to communion with Him.”⁶ Faith is supernatural, experiential knowing of supernatural matters.

      St. Paul wrote that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unknown” (Hebrews 11:1). St. Paul was not waxing metaphorical here: he meant these statements to be taken at face value. A substance does not consist of opinion or belief: you can experience it. Equally with evidences: you may have opinions about them, and you may express belief or incredulity or doubt about them, as with any experience, but neither belief nor opinion is faith. They aren’t knowledge.

      So faith is unmediated (that is, it circumvents the bodily senses), direct knowledge of things spiritual. Anagogical knowledge.

      Henri de Lubac approaches the matter circuitously:

      The divinity of the Word of God incarnate is in fact the central object of allegory. It is revealed, however, only to the “eyes of the heart,” to those “inner eyes,” those “spiritual eyes, those “eyes of the soul,” those “better eyes,” that are opposed to the eyes of the flesh and which are in reality the eyes received from God, the eyes “illuminated by the Gospel” or, following a frequent expression, the “eyes of the faith.” For faith has her own eyes. Faith is the light “that makes one see the light of the spirit in the law of the letter”; it is like a lamp lit in the night, penetrating the thick cloud of all the biblical “sacraments” which surround it. We are therefore to be imbued in the faith through allegory. The truths of the allegory, “mysteries of Christ and the Church,” are the “mysteries of the faith” hidden in the ceremonies of the Law.” They are the “sacraments of our faith.”⁷

      De Lubac points out that allegory is the doctrinal sense par excellence, and observes (p. 109), “One can therefore define the Christian faith as ‘allegorica doctrina.’ In fact, "what is allegory but the mystic doctrine of the mysteries?"⁸ Its content is exactly "the doctrine of the holy Church.”⁹ And he adds, “This relation of the faith to allegory, as always when it is a question of effecting passage to a higher order, can be understood only as a relation of reciprocal causality.”¹⁰ A few lines later, he reiterates:

      But in reality, let us say it again, there is essentially no point to look for any priority of allegory received by relation to faith nor of faith received by relation to the perception of allegory: each mutually conditions the other. It is one and the same indivisible act the elements and logical instants of which later theology will analyze that gives access to the one and to the other under the action of the Spirit of christ.¹¹

      For centuries, the various senses of Scripture were grouped as the literal (or historical) sense and the allegorical sense. Gradually, the latter term came to refer to an allegorical understanding of the literal sense, and the word “tropology” came to refer to two senses distinct from the allegorical sense, the moral and anagogical senses.

      No more than allegoria for the second sense was the word tropologia imposed here. In the most general acceptation, a trope was a figure, a mode, or a turn of phrase (Greek, tropos, Latin conversio),by which one turns some expression to designate some object other than the one naturally meant.¹² Tropologia, accordingly, was a speech turned around or “turning” something else “around”; it was a “turned” or “turning” manner of speech. There was nothing in it that might suggest an idea of moral conversion any more than there was in allegoria anything that would suggest the mystery of christ. Thus we understand that, within the nascent vocabulary of