More SPN meta

[ramblin_rosie]

Something I've been pondering this afternoon, picking up a thread from my last meta. Mild spoilers for 7.07.


I mentioned last time that it’s probably impossible for anyone to be completely healthy, in a Chestertonian sense, in a universe where God has abdicated. Given Dean’s confession in 7.07, I think it’s time to explain that idea.
Chesterton begins Orthodoxy by explaining his view that two signs of mental health are the ability to accept mystery and paradox for what they are and the related, crucial ability to believe in something other than oneself. He further argues in St. Thomas Aquinas that the ability to reason rightly begins with the question of whether a person can know anything about the objective reality outside his own mind. If the answer is no, then thought stops. If the answer is yes, sooner or later, the person will realize that the outside world is highly changeable. The next question is thus whether visible reality is the ultimate reality. If the answer is yes, the philosopher will end up siding with the Eastern philosophy that the only constant is change—heck, even the position of the North Star changes over time. If the answer is no, however, where is ultimate reality to be found? Or, to cite the question that prompted Chesterton to write Orthodoxy, “If man is not to believe in himself, what is he to believe in?”
Chesterton, Aquinas, and pretty much the whole of orthodox Christian thought answer that ultimate reality is to be found in God (YHWH, I Am That I Am). He is, to use the medieval framing, the unmoved Mover, the uncaused Cause. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and in Him we live and move and have our being. The universe as we know it does possess an objective reality—we’re not just figments of God’s imagination—but this reality derives from God’s.
This understanding is the same one that J. R. R. Tolkien used in The Debate of Finrod and Andreth when, drawing on Aquinas’ commentary on Hebrews, he had Finrod distinguish between amdir, hope that is an expectation of good based on past experience, and estel, often translated “high hope” but here translated as “trust”:

It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves. This is the last foundation of Estel, which we keep even when we contemplate the End: of all His designs the issue must be for His Children's joy. Amdir you have not, you say. Does no Estel at all abide?

Ay, there’s the rub for Dean. In that universe, he has no reason for estel because the angels had a hand in Mary’s death and God explicitly refused to help when Dean needed help the most. And his answer (if Joshua related it correctly) wasn’t “No, you have what you need; you can do this on your own” but “Back off, I’m done helping you,” words calculated to hurt. All created beings, as Aquinas argued and Dean has unfortunately learned, are inherently unstable and can’t live up to the kind of absolute trust that is estel. Had Cas not fallen, Dean might have been somewhat okay, but even that hope has been dashed. And now Cas is (presumed) dead, Sam’s cracked, Bobby’s mortal, all their other friends are gone, and Dean still hasn’t gotten over the fact that he broke in Hell...
If gold ruste, what shal iren do?
I have no clue how the writers can resolve this problem in any way that ends well for Dean (or Sam, for that matter) short of God finally returning to take charge of Heaven. I hope they’ll show Dean at least being able to trust Sam. But Ellen’s right; something has to change before Dean, and maybe the entire universe, self-destructs.

Comments

[etoile444.livejournal.com]

I'm going with your last line: "I have no idea how the writers can resolve this problem".

Is it foreshadowing that Dean was affirmed with these words: "virile manifestation of the divine"? Surely, they were funny, but in them also lies the truth. Remember it seemed that Cas and/or the leviathans did not want Michael released from Lucifer's cage. Perhaps that Dean had to break in hell, Michael had to also go to hell. Maybe (hey a girl can dream) Dean can vessel Michael and save the world.

[ramblin_rosie]

--Dude, I just wondered to jennytork whether Crowley's next move after being rebuffed by the Winchesters (which he will be, I've no doubt) will be to try to spring Michael. Great minds!
(As long as we're dreaming, can they bring back Gabriel while they're at it?)
But yeah, Edlund has kind of hinted that there's some sort of apotheosis in store for Sam and Dean. So maybe there is some truth in that affirmation. Would explain Death's interest in Dean....

[riotgrrlhotel.livejournal.com]

Ah, see this is what happens when I watch without concentrating. What I thought was a comedic line tossed off by a new age waiter could be incredibly important. (Oh please let it be important.) Might it not prove that Dean's made of something slightly more than human? Remember the promo posters for season six? Very easy to get distracted by Sammy's serpent (ahem) and less obvious is the fact the Dean is sporting a halo (it's much more obvious in the earlier versions.) Having Dean "say 'yes'" to Michael would not only be delicious in a fangirly way but would also give the writers a way of - how to put this - saving Dean from himself? Taking the weight off his shoulders? Thanks for the ideas!

[ramblin_rosie]

The fact that Hallucifer *and* LeviaDean sneer most at SAINT Dean has gotten slightly anvilicious, too. Hrm.

[riotgrrlhotel.livejournal.com]

Ooh please let this be actual foreshadowing and not our overactive imaginations! <3

[ramblin_rosie]

There's also the possibility that Joshua was lying.
I dunno, though--the Gnostic mythos might make sense, but I'm not sure it fits, considering that there's no way (yet) for humans to break past the demiurge to achieve union with the true God. One of the things Doug Cowan argues in his book Sacred Terror, though, is that horror as a genre capitalizes on fear of breakdown in the sacred order, and taking the "watchmaker God" idea to the extreme that God won't directly intervene even when creation starts tearing itself apart... pretty well qualifies, IMO.

[auntmo9.livejournal.com]

I have no clue how the writers can resolve this problem in any way that ends well for Dean (or Sam, for that matter) short of God finally returning to take charge of Heaven.

I am not sure I do either, and it is hard to trust them when their idea of Heaven is a place that relies on the past/inhabiting happy memories, rather than a future hope, where things are made new.*sighs*

-Dude, I just wondered to jennytork whether Crowley's next move after being rebuffed by the Winchesters (which he will be, I've no doubt) will be to try to spring Michael. Great minds!
(As long as we're dreaming, can they bring back Gabriel while they're at it?)

I certainly caught that line about the "virile manifestation of the divine"and it gave me pause to think as well. (And it would be nice to see Gabriel back, too). I did read somewhere that Sera had said that while the whole 'War in Heaven' angel story-arc was over, there might be individual stories for specific angels yet to be told.

[ramblin_rosie]

Yeah, they're definitely not going for the idea of Arda Healed as the goal of the angels' endgame.

I do hope we get to see some good angels, though, whether they bring Gabe and/or Michael back or not. The boys need some new friends.

[dodger-winslow.livejournal.com]

While I don't necessarily have faith that the writers will go here, the answer for Dean, IMO, is threefold:

1) To realize that God does not solve His children's problems for them, for all problems His children face are faced by His design, and are intended as instructions to a greater state of being than that in which the child currently resides.

2) To realize that he, Dean, must stop looking to external sources to validate that which he believes to be right, but rather must learn to look to himself for such answers, using those he trusts as points of stability to which he might anchor himself and/or sounding boards he might use to judge the soundness of his own thinking, but that in the end, the answers to all Dean's challenges lie only and solely at the feat of Dean Winchester himself. And in order to overcome those challenges, he must empower himself to change that which is intolerable by accepting the weight of the intolerable as his own; by stopping a continuing behavior of seeking to change the behavior of others to a good end and seek rather the change his own behavior in response to the behavior of others to a more productive end than he has heretofore enjoyed, being the sort who always looks to the external for faith he must have in himself in order to act in his own interests and, by proxy of himself, in the interests of others.

3) To realize that NO human is EVER worthy of the purity of faith and trust Dean consistently seeks to place in them, up to and including his father the invincible (John, not God), his brother the incorruptible (Sam, not Jesus), and himself ... AND THAT IS HOW IT IS INTENDED TO BE. To stop seeing an inability to live up to the purity of faith/trust he bestows upon others as a failure within them so much as it is the inevitability of Human frailty to which all Humans are subject, thus why they require the intervention of a savior in the first place to redeem them from their imperfect natures of never being as perfect as they would seek, in their best moments, to be.

Again, without expecting the writers of SPN to necessarily ever wrap themselves around such themes, those are the themes to which Dean must be answerable in my mind in order to overcome his own fear of failure both in himself and in others. Because as he is now? He looks to either himself or to others (John, Sam, Castiel) to be unfailingly perfect and unfailingly deserving of the faith he wishes to place in them when the only One who can succeed at not failing under the weight of such a burden is God himself.

And until Dean learns to not only understand this, but also accept it as the nature of ALL men, he will continually be looking to the external for a God surrogate when all God surrogates, by their very definition, must inevitably fail for being surrogates rather than God.

(continued)

continued

[dodger-winslow.livejournal.com]

And I still believe that understanding John is the key to those answers for Dean. Understanding how fragile and frightened and wholely unsuited John was to every task he undertook in their family's defense, yet how solely and ferociously John took all weight for such things upon himself, always making himself the "God" of his own world in being the one ultimately answerable for all choices made. In NEVER chosing to put his faith in any man's opinion or advice above his faith in himself as the one most suited to deciding what was best for his family, John gave Dean the perfect template for understanding that no matter how unmatched to the task at hand a man is, a man's only true victory comes from facing the task himself and taking the losses and the victories as the fruit of his choices and his choices alone. And while John demonstrably carried guilt for those times he failed in having chosen based on faith betrayed that he alone could, would, choose rightly, he never allowed the proof of his own inability to be perfect to impugn the ferocity of his faith in self when the next challenge arose before him. He never looked to another for answers, and he never gave away his power to change things for his sons by abdicating that power to the decisions of others for the safety net of having someone else to blame when things went pear-shaped, or to enjoy the relief of expecting someone else to make the right choice so he wouldn't have to.

And that is Dean's lesson still to be learned. That the faith he seeks to place in others is an effort to avoid the ramifications of his own choices/actions, so his faith must be first and last with himself and only himself. But in that faith in self, he must also understand that he is a man, not God, and that as a man, he will occasionally fail. And that failure cannot be an excuse to turn away from faith in himself, but rather must be something he forgives in himself, just as he must forgive Sam and Bobby and Castiel and John, himself, for being what they all are: imperfect, as are all things in the universe but for God.

But in their imperfections, they are perfection. For it is only in the imperfects' perceptions of self perfection that you get Castiel believing himself God; Lucifer believing himself equal to God.

And that is and always will be, in the end, John's place in Dean's evolution to manhood. Because John acted in absolute faith in his own judgment on all things, yet he suffered no illusions of self perfection. Rather, he embraced his own failings as necessary and unavoidable while never allowing them to undercut the faith in himself he had to have in order to continue to act as he felt it necessary to act despite what Bobby, or Pastor Jim, or Ellen or any other damn soul might advise him to the contrary. As John confessed to his son on his deathbed, "I know I've made mistakes, but I always did the best I could." And in this way, John walks in faith in ways Dean never has. Because John chose to exercise his own authority in all matters, always looking to himself for the final answers on all things and always accepting unto himself the weight of all successes and failures born of those choices. And he continued on, having FAITH that while he might not always do the right thing, he would do what he could do: the best he was able to do. And God would have to take care of the rest of it. Or not, as God saw fit to do.

And in this, John is the one man in SPN who shows the kind of blind faith in God that God seeks as manifest in His children. Because John walks in faith always ... faith in himself first, and faith in God for those things he cannot address himself. While Dean still looks to place all that faith in one bucket --- be it a John bucket, a Sam bucket, a Castiel bucket, or even a Dean bucket --- and in doing so, assures his own failure in matters of faith. He places his faith in the flawed, and then punishes the flawed who fail him in his faith by losing his faith in them. All of which accomplishes only one thing: the inevitability of ending up faithless in the end for the simple fact that no one but God himself is capable of never failing the faith of the faithful.

Re: continued

[ramblin_rosie]

You make a lot of good points, Dodger, and I agree that Dean is a perfectionist who is used to having to shoulder impossible burdens, expects far too much of himself and of others, tries to have estel in all the wrong things, and needs to rethink a lot of ingrained behaviors and thought patterns. And I'll grant that God's not a vending machine or a magic fix-it device. But I still think the sticking point has been and will continue to be DSOTM--the one time Dean sought God out, God essentially slammed the door in his face. I may be reading too much of myself into Dean here, but I think he could have accepted "You already have what you need, and you'll know what to do when the time comes." He wouldn't have liked that answer, but he could have lived with it because it wouldn't have implied abandonment. But that wasn't what Joshua said, and Dean didn't have the relationship with God that he had with John to be able to hear "Back off, it's not my problem" and understand "I trust you to do this yourself because you're a grown man and fully capable of using the gifts I gave you"--assuming that's what the statement meant. I'm not entirely sure that it did.
So the question remains whether God in that universe is worthy of the trust Dean wants to place in something other than himself. What Dean inferred in DSOTM is that God doesn't care--"Just another deadbeat dad with a bunch of excuses" who expects him to do the impossible when he's running on empty and never gives him a day off. And he's likely to need tangible evidence to the contrary before he can allow himself to trust God at all.
(And I'm likely to keep dreaming of dragging the boys into this universe, where God does answer the phone on the first ring!)

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Really interesting discussion, especially from the point of view of an atheist and lapsed Catholic like myself.... I really like dodger_winslow 's analysis, and find myself drawn to the whole 'Dean needs to trust himself, value himself' argument. If that is where the show goes I will be tremendously happy, whatever the route they take to get there.