What gets me in A Spy in the House of Love (which I just re-watched) is seeing Paul turned against his will and against his very being into a “client” of the dollhouse. And he does it for the same reason as Echo. He had just been told that to let Mellie know would “destroy her.” he acts out of love and becomes despicable. Like Christ, he is compelled by love to become implicated and soiled by everything he desires to free these young women from.

By the way, in Needs when the dolls relive their traumas they relive those during their dollhouse assignments as well as pre-dollhouse. We saw that last Friday too, with Sierra reliving her current ongoing trauma through her paintings, when she is not supposed to remember anything. I think we keep seeing that whatever “is” the human person, it comes into being during “lived time.” That whenever we are experiencing in the body we are living and developing as souls-and-bodies. Whereas the egos alone, on the tapes, do not grow and change or have any being. (Christianity’s insistence on the body’s resurrection is really the most unusual thing — and what shocked the Greeks to the core, of course.)

In Epitaph One, we see the entailments of the snake eating its own tale. At least one Doll has learned how to operate the Chair for her own intents and purposes. A “star vehicle” indeed.

http://www.activatedollhouse.com/

Dollhouse, folks, continues to be a total hoot! If you think about what it’s doing (and your own gut reactions) on a “meta” level, that is. I’ve shared my joy in this show with you folks before. If you want to hear more of me being all serious and professorial about it, you can check my new post over at deepgraceoftheory.

Thanks for the Nichols recommendation and the thoughts from Bonaventure and Gregory of Nyssa (via Dan) and on your own journey. In the Renaissance, “soul sleep” or “mortalism” was regarded as a heresy. I always wondered how we could be so literalistic about this, since it wouldn’t make any difference to the person if the soul slept until the resurrection or was with Christ in an intermediate state in the interim; either way we would experience the same thing: “today you will be with me in Paradise.” (And Christ wasn’t going to get there for three days anyway!) When we are dealing with time and the soul, we’re best to be very, very humble, as you say Hart suggests.

As far as the soul-body stuff…yeah, for the human soul to be complete it must always be connected with body. Gregory of Nyssa (On the soul and the resurrection) has an interesting way of showing that, given the doctrine of the Resurrection, we must affirm that the soul is always connected to the body, even in a mysterious way after death. I think (again these are DWM’s thoughts on Bonaventure) we can also perhaps think of the soul as the whole person, body-spirit. In some sense a human is never fully human unless she is bodysoul. I want to affirm your incarnationalism. My own journey with this has been a move from a duality in my younger years to no existence to soul when body dies (accept in the Mind of God, until resurrection, my days as a Process disciple, which I think is very problematic now…the process metaphysic i mean) to some kind of “dipolar monism” in which the human is always a bodily being whose organizing principle or dynamism is soul, which is somehow the continuity between our present bodily state and resurrection. And yet this flesh is always, as u note, “in transit.” We must acknowledge that the human microcosmos is, like the macrocosmos, an unfolding story, not isolatable monads. I have been helped a lot in this by Terrence Nichols wonderful book (which is perhaps the best thing I have read in the whole science and theology discussion) THE SACRED COSMOS: CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE CHALLENGE OF NATURALISM. I have a hunch that David Bentley Hart is right when he says that there is some sense in which our talk of the soul will always be en route or ad hoc because of the mysteriousness of the subject. I don’t have anything like a market on this subject, but just some thoughts that your response spurred…

By Hopkins do u mean Gerard Manley Hopkins? I will have to check that out. I love his work! I also checked out your blog and look forward to more of your work, including science/theology discussions. Thanks for the stimulating discussion!

I really love this.

Have you ever contemplated G. H. Hopkins’ “The Leaden-Golden Echo” — in relation to the way the Divine memory preserves every jot and tittle of a human be-ing? Thus Hopkins’ God in His merciful refusal to let us go/let go of us transmutes “Despair!” into “Spare!”

“Scientifically speaking, it suddenly appears (only since the 1960s) that the universe is on a cosmic journey. And this cosmic journey, astonishingly, possesses its own unique and unrepeatable history of development. Over and over again, that is to say, at innumerable points and in innumerable localities, our universe has taken one path instead of another. Thus it has individuated, through vanishingly large numbers of events involving quantum indeterminacy. These contingencies, large and small, in turn became the initial conditions for subsequent processes of development, many being processes extraordinarily sensitive to initial conditions and therefore capable of diverging dramatically over time as a result.

“This radically new, post-Newtonian scientific universe is still highly “determinate,” of course, but it is not rigidly “deterministic.” Far from it, in fact. Predetermination is not the right word for this kind of history, nor is mere chance or total randomness. There have always been limits and limitations. There have been built-in or inherent parameters and these have (determinately) directed the comic journey along its way. At the same time, too, there have been evolving limits or parameters that have emerged along the way, and differently in various locales, parameters that developed because conditions contingently went one way instead of another. These conditions need not have been exactly what they were; nonetheless, because they were what they were, they too came in time to exert causal pressures upon what followed after.

“In this kind of universe, it is especially easy to see that the battles waged during the modern centuries over “free will” and “predestination” in the religious and philosophical arenas were as wide of the mark as the battles between “heredity” and “environment.” But here again, the arts and sciences tradition prior to the modern centuries were actually much more in tune with our newest scientific picture of the universe than the Newtonian Enlightenment could be. If we look to Augustine’s Confessions, for example, for an enormously influential account of the journey of one person’s salvation history, that history turns out to be just this sort of ongoing symphony of inherent parameters and unfolding discoveries and contingencies of development.

“For Augustine, it was quite apparent that there was no timeless “moment” of salvation. Instead, his entire temporal journey was at every point involved in determining whether or not a personhood could/would emerge that would be capable of being moved (because of all the grace that produced the journey in the first place and sustained it at every point) in the direction of the destiny this person most deeply and truly desired, and for which this person was most deeply and truly meant. Augustine’s earlier life was a heuristic journey towards the person Augustine had always been called to be, by God and by his own inmost desires (but then, the be-ing that possessed these desires was the being made by God and only frustrated and laid waste by Augustine himself). The blind alleys and the mistaken estimates and choices of Augustine’s journey were intrinsic to it, and immeasurably instructive; the outcome of the journey was always as much always in doubt as it was inevitable.

” The pre-Newtonian Christian tradition, in other words, had been too wise to reduce things to the polar opposites of mind/matter and freedom/determinism that arose in the 17th century under the influence of the new Kuhnian paradigm of inert matter and abstract laws of motion. The earlier Western liberal-arts tradition was in a position to be far more profound in some respects than our own day has been. But unless we are blinded by condescension, and we refuse to see our own day “as itself merely a period,” we are also in a happy position to learn dialectically from every earlier scientific and religious endeavor of our long historical past.”

That’s a fascinating point you raise about persons who have lost their memories and how we hold them in our memories (as does God). Part of the problem with us today is that we insist on thinking of “things” as discrete objects rather than unfolding processes developing their potentialities through time. Just because an elderly person at this particular moment in time has no memory of her individuating and self-expressive past, is she to be viewed only as she is in this slice of a moment?

If we view her as Augustine views his own life history, she was named and called by God inside her mother’s womb and her entire life journey is her development into what she was meant to be. (I just wrote a paragraph in my mss on Knowing that’s relevant to this and I’ll post it here later.) It wasn’t the moment in the garden that saved Augustine. It was the entire life journey and every choice he had made good and bad and God’s consistent prevenient grace that had developed him into the person capable (by grace) of saying Yes in the garden. And he is clearly every moment after concerned that he should remain faithful to that true self and to the God who saw that self through that long process of soul-making. The growth to maturity cannot be undone by the body’s decay and infirmities, can it?

But I would lean toward thinking that the personhood or soul we are talking about is not who it is apart from the body; that the resurrection of the body is the scandal and the glory of Christian Incarnationalism. I was wondering about that Icon of Christ receiving the “soul” of Mary into his arms at her death, where she is tiny and like a child in her son’s arms. Is there some suggestion there of the incompleteness and vulnerability of the naked soul or personhood in heaven, until it is made whole and re-united with its body? Can Orthodox readers comment on this? Is this not almost like a dream or a memory or a kernel of the person, this bodiless “form’ that is only itself as the life pervading the body?

I am ceaselessly fascinated by the way Augustine turned away from the world, all of whose creatures had told him “No, I am not God; God it was who created me” — and he looked instead into the inmost depths of his own being. iAnd THERE he found the image of God and ascended in an instant to the divine I Am….

Isn’t that Image of Christ in our inmost person the most profound insistence on the mutually and reciprocity and reflexivity of all be-ing? As with the Trinity, to be is to be in relationships of sameness and difference in a complex, mutually self-constituting dialectic that unfolds and is enriched through time. The more deeply we are related to others, the more individuated and free we can become, as ourselves. We need this space of appearance in which we interact with others to become who we potentially are or can be. And the inability to be in relationship with others paradoxically makes us dependent and enclosed and unable to learn to be freely ourselves.

I want to think more about your comments above. Thanks so much. I’m the one who is going off in all directions, but can’t help it!

Also, now that I am watching the series, I find it interesting to bring the show’s exploration of the constitution of the human (perhaps we could even say soul) by memory to the discussion. Is there human, a soul, apart from our memory. This takes me to Augustine and THE CONFESSIONS for it is through memory that Augustine is able to tell the story of his soul and how it is relationally constituted. It is constituted through relation with friends and family and, through these relationships and in a strange way that transcends these relationships, it is constituted by the desire for God. It seems that for Augustine the desire or love shared in these networks of relationships is always rooted in God’s own Desire and thus Desire for Augustine. Memory plays a key part not only in Augustine’s ability to tell the story but as the story of desire develops even more IN his telling of it, for Augustine is somehow in the throes of desire as he struggles with this memory when he asks “who do I love when I love my God?”

This of course begs a number of questions, but one of which is brought to my mind by your post and the series itself. Namely, is the human person, the soul (and here I understand soul in the Nyssen-Thomistic way in which the soul is not some non-material thing inside the body, but infuses the body completely and animates the body. Perhaps we could say, and this is coming from conversations with Dan McClain on Bonaventure and the soul, there is perhaps a sense in which we can say that the soul IS the whole person as a di-polar monism of body-spirit) constituted completely by memory, or is there something more? Conversations between the Dollhouse staff and the dolls in which the staff, at least the head of security, assumes there is just a shell and they are really not having a conversation with a person, beg this question.

How this question is answered seems to have all kinds of implications for how we treat those whose frailty and age has brought them to an extensive loss of memory (they don’t recognize their family members, remember their past, etc). Can there be an enduring identity when the memory of the narrative of one’s life is lost? This pushes on our individualism you helpfully point out in that I wonder if it only has to be the memory of the individual which constitutes her humanity. Communal memory perhaps keeps this alive. And yet I do not think this is enough (though certainly helpful in moving us beyond a pure individualism) as we are still left in what William Desmond describes as a self enclosed immanentism. I tend to think we must be open to the porosity of our individual and collective memory to its “porosity” to the transcendent. Here we are helped by Augustine in the CONFESSIONS for I think his insight that the Triune God is the ground of Being in Whom all exists (the One to whom all of the Beauty of Creation bears witness according to Augustine). So if we move through the signs of Creation we get to the signifier of the Triune God who holds it all in Being. However, Augustine gives more than this “external” movement to God. He also basically claims that God is “the One who is closer to me than I am to myself.” So if I could move through the icon of creation to its source I will find God but ALSO if I could strip down my being (one assumes he means memory and all) to my “core” I would not find “Me” there but God, for it is the Triune God’s Existence through Whom I exist. I think this is perhaps something like what Desmond is getting out when he speaks of the Transcendence that our immanent existence is “porous to.”

I suppose this leads me to say that, rather than being locked in a purely immanent, socially constructed reality of memory, memory (in its individual and collective forms) opens us up to transcendence. Perhaps we could say, in a Derridian accent, that memory shows us the “traces” of what is enduring in the human and the porosity to the transcendent in which creaturely narrative or memory exists.

I am not sure how much this intersects with your post or if I am running off in a completely different direction :-). But your post was really helpful and was a gift that opened me up to this art and its fruitfulness for thought. thanks again!