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Super high value comment. Rec'd for an AAQC.
A couple points.
Okay, that legitimately helps. I will admit I was hung up on the hyper-stylistic nature of this writing and, I guess, missed the point (score one for the "ToolBooth is too dumb to get it" clique). I'll still retain the point, however, that the highly stlytistic nature of PoMo writing undermines its mission. If I can't even tell who's talking, I sure as hell can't parse their "critique" of modernism.
Which leads me to;
Then offer potential solutions! I remember when DFW killed himself. I was in college at the time and sort of adjacent to literary circles. His death was received as a Big Deal and a Major Loss. From time to time, I find myself re-googling DFW to look back at his suicide. The two thoughts I always come away with are 1) If only he had been a Catholic and 2) I think one cause of his permanent despair was that he was so problem oriented in his critiques of the current world and had failed to find a way to attempt to drive towards a solution. Yes, I am aware that many, many people (including quite a few here on the Motte) think that It's All Too Fucked Up To Save (TM) and that any effort to try is doomed to failure. I'll even acknowledge they could be right - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try because, at the very, very least, it gives you a reason to get out of bed, a sense of pride and purpose, and stops you from over-intellectualizing yourself to death .... literally (DFW).
Hard, but respectful, disagree. I'm a practicing traditional catholic. I make fun of myself on here for being a n00b at it, but the truth is I work at it; I know all of The Most Necessary Prayers in English and Latin, I say the rosary daily, read The Imitation of Christ along with other devotionals and newer academic Theological Books. I'm currently working my way through the 700+ page Catechsim of Fr. Spirago. I can follow Low and High mass without a Missal. I'm considering taking some voice lessons so I could participate in chant and polyphony.
The Catholic faith is, by far, the most complex thing I have ever approached. I already know that I will spend my entire life trying to figure it out spiritually, intellectually, mentally, and emotionally and will utterly, utterly fail. To mix some metaphors; the Catholic faith makes a kubernetes deployment across availability zones look like a game of tic tac toe. It makes matrix algebra look like finger counting.
But I find all of this complexity legible.
I know what various theological points are trying to do, even if they haven't migrated fully into my mind and heart. I know what even the more mystical devotionals are getting at, even if takes time parse. I can read canon law and think, "This is above my paygrade, but I'm following the nouns and verbs and basic structure."
With PoMoLit, it's so esoteric at times (really thinking of Gravity's Rainbow here) that it loses meaning at the basic sentence level. I remember reading one passage and saying to myself, "Pynchon, I think, is using some sort of double nested reference to an event outside of the book as metaphor for the internal thoughts of one of the brand new characters he's just introduced ... and is also wrapping it in tounge-in-cheek irony." Being deliberately obtuse is often a feature of pretentious academics trying to hide their fundamentally ineptitude. I'm still not convince many or several PoMoLit authors suffer the same fate.
The point about the nature of postmodernism is good, yes. Postmodernism, as the name implies, is a critique of modernism, and modernism is a type of progressive model narrative that is itself at odds with traditional faith. I take one of the claims of postmodernism to be that no theory or model of the world can ever be sufficient to the reality - this to the extent that it is impossible, in principle, to adequately describe the world in language. Thus their obsession with using language in destabilising ways, to trouble categories once thought to be certain. Even though postmodernists usually include religious narratives (I would argue simplified strawman versions of religious understandings) within the category of theoretical models of the world that must be destabilised, they are just recapitulating the insight of Augustine and his seashell.
That said I think it is a valid critique of postmodernism to say that often its adherents have gone too far, or become obsessed with destabilisation for its own sake. By contrast I'd argue that theology must always find a balance between its kataphatic and apophatic modes - nothing we can say of God can ever be wholly adequate to his being, but nonetheless we are commanded to speak of him. Theological speech must occur, despite its always-contingent nature.
Speaking of religion, to Catholicism...
I suppose, as a traditional and even somewhat doctrinaire Protestant, I feel obliged to push back a little here, albeit in what I hope is a charitable manner, aimed at our mutual growth in faith. To the extent that you are deeply immersing yourself in the broader Christian tradition and growing in knowledge of God and love of Christ, I have nothing to say but "amen", and I affirm the necessity of growing in the understanding of the gospel, even knowing that you will never be able to wholly comprehend it.
Even so I would like to suggest, tentatively and as kindly as I can, that the heart of Christian faith does not lie in all the prayers you know, or in following mass without a missal, or participating in polyphony. All those things can be good, and the deliberate effort to discipline yourself so that you can more fully attend to divine things is good, but we must always be careful not to mistake the tools for the things the tools are there to point us to.
I'm sure you understand this principle, but just as a reminder, I suppose, there is little need for a lay Catholic to understand the details of canon law. The administration and good order of the church is important, but you don't need to understand the science of architecture to live in a house, nor the science of nutrition to benefit from a well-cooked meal. Sometimes I see converts, whether to Catholicism or to any other tradition, become obsessed with understanding everything, even things that are not needful for them, and they pile up so many burdens on themselves that they stumble in their walk towards God.
The catholic faith - both in the small-c, universal Christian sense, and inthe capital-C, Roman Catholic sectional sense - is in some ways the most complex thing in the world, but in other ways it is very simple, and to be received with the simplicity and humility of a child.
Master the intellectual doctrines, the liturgy, the public performance of worship, all these things are good, but it is worth occasionally pausing to ask ourselves the question, "Is my work at these things helping me grow closer to God?"
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