BEYOND RELIGION

Beyond Religion?

Tenzin Gyatso is the 14^th and current Dalai Lama.  He was activiely exercizing the office of the head of state of Tibet when the  Chinese armed forces assumed control of the country in 1959. He was 24 at the time.  Since then, he has lived in India and maintained a govern­ment in exile known officially as the “Central Tibetan Administration.”  He retired in March of 2011 at 76.

Since the 1600’s the Dalai Lama has been the traditional civil authority of Tibet.  But he is also the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.  Perhaps it is because of his double role that the present Dalai Lama was keen to write a book called Beyond Religion.  (Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, 188 pages).  For the book suggests that natio­nal governments should consider establishing programs that pro­mote “spiritual” values and practices as part of public policy.  This may seem to contradict the separation of church and state.  But he is quick to point out that the values he speaks about — compassion, universal respect, altruism, fairness, justice — are human social values.  They are not “supernatural” or necessarily religious.  They belong to humanity; and since they en­hance our lives, they are in everyone’s self interest.  Nothing could be more “secular,” he says, and therefore they are beyond religion.  They can be embraced by people of all religions … as well as those with none.

Despite the possible confusion created by the book’s title, there is no effort on his part to put down religion or eliminate its role.  The title is meant only as a reaffirmation of the universal values em­bedded in the Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.    They are truly secular values, he insists, and beyond any religion.  Since these same values have traditionally been fostered by the world’s religions, they have unfor­tu­nately been consi­dered “off limits” to secular govern­ments.  Yes, of course they are espoused by religion, he says, because they are good; but religion does not own them.  They belong to humanity.   They are something the modern secular state has every right to embrace and encourage.  They are universal human values and practices. 

And there is another paradox:  he identifies “altruism” with “self-interest.”  This seems counter-intuitive.   We have be­come accustomed to thinking of them as contradictories, or at least contraries.  But if we allow ourselves to assume the perspective he suggests, we realize that we have been opera­ting on an unnecessarily limited definition of “self-interest.”  We have ac­cep­ted a point of view prejudiced by a flawed view of organic human nature.   “Self-interest” does not necessarily mean selfish — taking for oneself and disregarding the needs of others.  A “self-interest” that leaves out compassion and service of others is not self-interest at all; it is self-defeating.   Being secular means to make our own decisions without having to obey the commands of religious autho­rity or sacred writings, but it does not mean losing our humanity or the importance of community.   Encouraging compas­sion and altruism as a matter of public policy, and training the youth in their practice, is the legitimate task of secular society. 

Religion

The Dalai Lama is making suggestions for secular ethics apart from religion.  But what about religion?  What I have been talking about in my blogs is religion … and in particular the reform of the Christian religion.  There are similarities to the Dalai Lama’s program, I admit:  like him I also eschew the super­natural; I focus on ethical behavior whose value is determined solely by what is good for people in this one world and not by “commands” from a humanoid “God” who lives in another; I believe human beings are capable of living a good life without the interven­tion of forces from another world like “grace” or the sacraments; I agree with him that the “spiritual” is a dimen­sion of material reality, not something separate from or opposed to it.

He brackets religion, including his own.  He says nothing of his own private beliefs, except to say that he is “non-theist.”  The term as he uses it is designed to contrast with “theist” which by his descriptions evoke the personal anthropomorphic deity of the religions of the “Book.”  Many people might find the concept “non-theism” a contradiction of the very meaning of religion.  I do not.  For me “non-theism” is the most important characteristic that I share with the Dalai Lama.  And like him, “non-theism” is meant to describe religion, not secular society. 

For non-theism is not just another term for atheism.  It rather stands for the complete rejection of a “God” who could interact with humans in ways that characterize relationship between human beings.  Non-theism means that “God” is not a “person” it doesn’t matter how “big” you think he is.  “God” is not an agent in any sense.  “God” does not act in human history.  “God” does not have a “will” or issue commands, or reward or punish any­­one.  “God” neither creates nor permits (nor prevents) natural or human-made disas­ters — earthquakes, plagues, tsunamis, wars, ecological destruc­tion, genocide — you may have noticed.  “God” is simply not a “person” in any way that would allow us the use of the term.

But I go even further.  Not only does non-theism mean that “God” is not a person, it also means that “God” is not an entity.  “God” is neither a he nor a she nor an it.  “God” is not identifiable as a separate, stand-alone item, or unit, or organism, or substance, or object of any kind resi­ding in this world or in some other imaginary world of “spirit.”  “God” is simply not a “thing” of any kind.   And yet “God” exists and is fully part of this material universe.  In fact “God” is its very dynamism.  How can we conceive this?

“God” is energy — the energy to exist, to survive.  It is the energy that sustains every particle and every collection of particles of whatever shape or kind in the entire universe.  It is that “in which all things live and move and have their being.”  This energy is neither created nor destroyed, and its thirst for endless existence is responsible for every form and feature and substance and entity and organ­ism in the universe.  It has, in this non-directive sense, “created” all things while itself remaining uncreated by anything other than itself.  It is self-sustaining and self-explanatory.  It is self-elaborating and capable of evolving into virtually anything, even things that appar­ently transcend its most primitive forms, their own component elements.  These highly elaborated composite organisms, like human beings, were once thought to belong to a differ­ent sphere of existence altogether, called “spirit.”   But we now know they are not.  They are matter, like every­thing else that exists.  They are simply the most amazing examples to date of what matter’s energy does to exist and of the unimaginable range of its possible combina­tions.

Objections

Q.:  So how is this different from “atheism”?  If this “God” is not a person, and not even a separate entity, how can you call these proposals “religion”?  These are common, ordinary facts, known and shared by all people acquainted with science.  Aren’t these also, like the Dalai Lama’s suggestions, beyond religion? 

A.:  No.  To the contrary, I am saying that this “God” forms the basis of a religion that goes beyond secular society and mere ethical behavior because it is focused on an intimate relationship.  This exis­tential dynamism is not just a blind impersonal force because this dynamism is my very self and I cannot possibly relate to myself on anything but intimate loving terms.  I love myself and I love my life.   We hu­mans relate with recognition, grati­tude and love to ourselves and religion is an intimate intersub­jective connection to material energy which is, after all, ourselves.   We are nothing but matter’s energy.  Does that come as a surprise?  Just what did we think we were?  Aren’t we happy to be-here and to be what we are?  How could we not be passionately in love with our existence? 

Q.: So, then, is religion really only self-love … self-worship? 

A.: No.  Because everything else is also made of the same material energy.  What I love in myself I have to recognize and love in the plants, the animals, the insects, the stars and galaxies because it is also what they are as well.  Just like me, they are nothing but material energy.  My love for what I am cannot be limited to me.  There is no basis for an individualism here, a selfishness directed at myself alone.  This “God” of which I speak energizes us all, and makes us all a community sharing matter’s drive to exist.  I am what everything is.  The Dalai Lama would agree when I say with the Upanishads: I am THAT.  I have an intimate and intense relationship to THAT.   This is what I mean by religion.

Q.: Why, then, do you keep using the word “God”?  When you say “God” it makes me think of the “God” of the “book,” the “God” who was believed to perform miracles, punish enemies, give commandments, save us from Satan and evil.  This “God” you speak of does none of these things.   Why call it “God”?   

A.: Yes, you are right.  The word “God” is not a good word, but I am stuck.  What word can I use to make it clear that I am not talking about a mere ethical program, even one about compas­sion and altruism like the Dalai Lama’s.  I need to make it clear that I am talking about  a mysti­cal relationship of profound intimacy to the souce of myself and all things … in which I am immer­sed like a sponge in the sea … evoking the most passionate feelings I can imagine because it IS everything I am, everythintg I have, everrything I love and everything I could possibly hope for.  It IS my very self.   I need to find a word that says without confusion that I am talking about nothing less than an intimate love-relationship … a relationship  of worship … adoration … gratitude … that calls forth my service … a relationship that is not just an enlightened self-interest but passionate union grounded in my very being-here.

Help me out here, someone.  How do I say what I mean without sliding back into an ancient imagery built on illusion and ignorance.   We once believed “God” was a humanoid puppeteer in the sky, who inexplicably refused to use his almighty power to prevent the torments that nature heaps upon us and who stood idly by while men claiming to act in his his name turned people into groveling self-loathing slaves, stole their dignity and freedom and destroyed their culture and their lives.  There is no such “God.”  How do you say that … and love the one that is.

Is religion “nonsense”?

Religion has no facts

In the short preface to his first book, known as the Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein states: “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”  He suggests that what lies on the other side of the limits of clear speech is “nonsense.” What kind of “speech” is religion?  Is it something other than knowledge altogether?  Does it fall beyond the limits of clear speech?  

A friend recently confronted me with an objection that I have heard before. “You claim to be against Catholic absolutes,” she said, “but if you were able actually to get the changes you are after, you would have to propose that they were ‘necessary,’ and doesn’t that imply ‘absolute’?  Wouldn’t you simply be substituting one set of absolutes for another?  If you don’t, you’ll end up like the Protestants … is that what you want”?

Aside from pushing the instant recoil button for a Catholic at the mention of the word “Protestant,” the objection hovers somewhere in the vicinity of the traditional argument that truth is absolute.  Protestant rejection of Catholic absolutism was traditionally derided as “relativism” in Catholic circles.  Relativism is not an option, according to this viewpoint, for it would mean that everything is up for grabs.  If people can believe anything they want, they can do anything they want and morality goes down the tubes.  Morality must be derived from absolute principles clearly discernible in nature or deducible from the revealed facts of “supernature.”

The unstated assumption that underlays this way of looking at things is that religious belief corresponds to religious facts, real things, accurately represented in propositions — articulated statements and descriptions that can be codified, to which assent and compliance are evaluated and verified.  ”Truth” in this view is based on realities — definite identifiable “things” like the spiritual soul, the divinity of Christ, or sanctifying grace — which can be reliably established and accurately expressed.  ”Truth” is precisely the correlation between the “thing” as it exists in the real world (whether natural or supernatural), and the proposition that is used to refer to it.  The full complement of those propositions accumulates to a world-view that may be called a doctrine or a philosophy or a religion.

A different view

But I am proposing something entirely different.  I am not promoting a new series of propositions whose “truth” is better than the old ones, or a new set of moral and ritual practices that are more in sync with this “better truth.”  Religion for me is not “truth” because religion has nothing to do with “things,” or facts, therefore it is not about the correlation between “things” and the propositions that define them.  Religion is rather an active and interactive relationship — an activity — not objects or substances or places or even “persons.”  Religion does not speak to what the things are that are out there in the real world; that’s science’s job.  Religion speaks about how we as human beings are related to what science knows.  And since all relationships are virtual realities not “things,” the language religion uses for all its propositions is metaphorical not “factual.”  

Metaphor is the natural language of relationship because the content and subject matter of all relationships is freely chosen by the inter-relating subjects for purposes that have to do with the relationship alone.  The content of relationships — the transactional material that sustains them — are interactive subjective recognitions, acknowledgements, stances, commitments, attitudes, affections, communications, valences, choices, which are all actions and activities. Relationship is an entirely inter-subjective phenomenon; it does not deal with “things” outside the relating subjects, like objects, places, persons — facts.  The meaning of religion is entirely exhausted in relationship; there is no remainder.

Religion has no facts. 

The only facts that religion relates to are as commonly known and as science describes them.  Science’s descriptions, however, are limited to the terms its measuring instruments will allow.  Religion goes further than science because it speaks about how those very same facts actively impact us as human beings — how they relate to us — and how we, in turn, relate to them.  The facts are openly known and accessible to all; nothing is hidden.  Religion does not have any new facts of its own.  What religion does is interpret the relational dimensions of commonly known facts in two areas of deep concern to us: (1) the source and matrix in which we “live and move and have our being,” and (2) human community and collaboration for collective survival.  Science describes those facts in the language of its tools: its probes, its experiments, and its mathematics; religion, on the other hand, describes our relationship to those very same facts in the language of the human conatus: i.e., what those facts mean to us — from the ecstatic gratitude we feel for our own existence, through human anxiety about death and annihilation, to human love and group survival.  The categories on that short list are real but they are not things.  They are matters of ultimate concern to human beings.  They are the stuff of our significant relationships.

Religion has no facts.  There are no places which religion alone knows about: no other world, no heaven or hell, purgatory or limbo; this world is all there is … there are no “things” or persons or entities that only religion knows about: no sanctifying grace, no soul, no sacramental character, no humanoid “God,” no saints or angels.  What we see and science may discover and measure is what there is. There is nothing else.  But how it all relates to the deep concerns of human beings and how we in turn relate to it are questions science does not address.  Religion speaks to the human condition, human existential dependency, cooperative communal survival, human relationships, human demands for justice, fidelity, love.  Existence is the same for all.  But science doesn’t care how obsessively attached you are to it, or to those whom you may have lost … what you may be willing to betray to hold onto it … or how you may use others’ vulnerability to its loss to enhance your own temporary grasp of it.  Science doesn’t care if you think existence cannot be trusted, or that you would just as soon be dead.  Science may describe and measure moral fall-out but doesn’t really care whether justice, love and peace prevail among humankind, or what happens to us when it doesn’t.  Science wants nothing; it simply describes what is there.  It is we who need and want.  Religion is the “science” of human need, human desire, and human choice for human values and ultimate concerns.

“God”

How does this play out?  Let’s start with the notion of “God.”  It is assumed that it is part of religion’s job to assert that there is such a “thing” as “God.” (It is also assumed we “know” what we mean by “God.”) Since, according to this tradition, “God” exists as an independent entity, it follows that that entity can be described fairly accurately by distinguishing it over against other “things” that are not “God.”  The description supposedly mirrors the structure of reality.  The propositions that contain those descriptions are judged by the accuracy of their correspondence to that structure.  

But this theoretical correspondence between word and reality cannot be assessed and verified, because there is no identifiable “God” available for comparison.  Religion cannot guarantee it speaks the truth about “God” because it has no source for that “fact” outside of its own declarations. “God” cannot be clearly pointed to, seen, heard, identified, measured, explored, questioned or tested, hence there is nothing for the word to be compared with.  The only thing religion has to go on are the claims it has received from past generations of believers — earlier propositions.  When those propositions are examined, it becomes clear that they were a pre-scientific set of conjectures commonly accepted to explain phenomena that are now understood by science to have natural explanations.  “God” was imagined as a cosmological entity that effected cosmological change.

Once we let science inform us about what we now know cannot be attributed to this putative “God,” we find that it includes the rational design and intentional creation of the universe of things and ourselves in it.  The “thing” called “God” as traditionally understood, in other words, does not exist. 

After you shake down what remains, the only “factual” thing left is the human perplexity over existence itself: our “sense of the Sacred” (awe at the universe and its myriad forms) and our existential human anguish which widens to include aspirations for immortality and human communitarian justice.  Traditionally we have always referred such questions to “God.”  The intriguing thing is that today science can concretely identify the real “factual” source of those feelings.  And that means that it is the source of those feelings that was, all along, the real ground of religion, for it is precisely whatever drives our addiction to existence which drove us into the arms of “God.”

These feelings are what I call, following Spinoza, expressions of the conatus: the intense, ineradicable, insuppressible, human attachment to existence … life … in the form of  this organic configuration, the human body.  The conatus, the human “drive to survive,” explains everything we are and everything we are driven to do.  It is an observable, measurable fact at every level.  It is the engine of human life.  Our traditional notion of “God” — erroneously built on a false ancient “science” — corresponds with perfect symmetry to our necessary addictive connection to existence.  The existential needs religion answers are organically embedded in our human flesh.  They are not arbitrary; they are not optional; they are not fictions; they are not fantasies or illusions.  We have no choice.  Even when our minds tell us we do not need or want to exist any longer, our very bodies trump all else and prevent us from self-annihilating.  The conatus — the urge to self-preservation — is an intrinsic feature of our organic make-up, just as it is for every other living thing that we have ever encountered on the face of the earth, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest animals.  It is so ubiquitous and homogeneous in character that we have every right to suppose that it is an embedded feature of the very particles of matter of which all organisms are made.

What we have been calling “God” is precisely that which we have traditionally claimed corresponds to those deepest most inescapable needs as human beings.  “God” is what we have always meant as the source and wellspring, the matrix, the guarantor and protector of existence.  And it is “God” that establishes the paradigm of benevolence and self-donation whose imitation, since time immemorial, is thought to provide ultimate human well being.  To live morally was to be “like God.”  It was to dwell at the very fountainhead of being itself.  It would heal us … make us whole … and totally happy.

“God” is not other

I claim that religion cannot declare “God” to be anything other than the source and matrix of existence for that is what generates the conatus.  But what is this source, and what do we know about it?  These are not “religious” questions; they are scientific.  The existence we actually experience is not any kind of separate entity at all, as we used to claim for “God,” but rather an existential potential — an energy, a power (potentia) — that all things intrinsically possess and actualize (and we humans can experience, observe and measure) by continuing to exist from moment to moment.  Existence is not a “thing,” it is an empirical activity which everything exercises each to its own degree.  If this power, this material energy, is the wellspring and matrix of the continuously self-extruding existence of all things — the energy by which and in which everything exists and does what it does — then it is a universal process, and not a separately identifiable describable object or item or entity or “person” of any kind.  If material energy is taken to be “God,” then “God” is not an entity or a “person;”  “God” is a universal energy in process.

Existence is a universally shared energy which, in my case I would be justified in calling “mine.”  It is something I am in touch with intimately, interiorly, but not something I can identify as over against myself.  It is my very own act of “being here.“  It is not-other than me.  There is no way such a reality could fall under the category of a “thing” that I could know.  Since existence is equally mine and everything else’s, what I am “knowing” is the source of a universal self-identity that does not permit me to form a “subject-object” relationship which is the fundamental structure of “knowledge.”  For what I am claiming to “know” as object is the very subject which is doing the “knowing” — me.  We are in the realm of metaphysical tautology here.

I am aware of myself.  I experience my own self-awareness.  So I understand intimately — from inside — what it means to exist.  I am related to my existence, but not as to another, which is the structure of all normal relationships between two separate independent beings.  I am related to existence as to that self-constituting activity which I myself do from moment to moment.  Exactly how I am able to do this, I do not know.  The propositions with which I describe this phenomenon use conventional words and therefore appear similar to those used for normal “knowledge,” but they are not.  And the reason is that the phenomenon is an activity that is simultaneously proper to me and to all things. So I understand existence because of my intimate relationship to it.  I understand it connaturally — as the cognitive side of my conatus — but in that moment I am simultaneously understanding what all things do, because we all do the same thing.  This understanding is what Wittgenstein would call “pointing to” or “showing.”  It is not really “knowing” for it is not saying anything.  It makes “no sense,” in his terms, because it is not valid propositional knowledge.  It is what he impishly calls “senseless” and “nonsense;” it cannot be credentialed as knowledge because it is a tautology.  And since it is not knowledge it cannot be judged as to its “truth” in the normal sense of the word … i.e., by objective verification. 

How would I possibly verify the statement “I exist?”  I would have to be able to contrast it with “non-exis­tence” and by way of some stated comparison conclude, “ … I exist,”  But I do not know “non-exis­tence” either, because there is nothing to know.  I cannot even describe it, because I would have to do so in terms of the existence I am trying to “point to.”  It would be a vicious circle.  Existence cannot be distinguished from anything, therefore it cannot be defined.  So it cannot be known or validly said … but it can be “pointed to,” “shown” and looked at for it is really there and I experience it and I am intimately familiar with it.  It is a tautology that is self-evident and self-explanatory.  All that can be said about existence is that it is what all things are doing all the time.  I feel it is entirely appropriate to say that existence is “that in which all things live and move and have their being.”

All things insofar as they exist are doing something that is so similar that, despite their obvious differences as “things,” we are talking about the same activity in each.  It’s not an activity proper to any one thing idiosyncratically.  It is not part of any one thing’s exclusive activity and so it cannot be claimed that it is already contained in and derives from the definition of that thing.  No “thing” contains within its definition that it has to exist or that it alone exists. 

The background and cosmo-ontology: existence is matter’s energy

Where does “God” fit into all this?   The only real “fact” out there is the common existence that all things activate and their connatural relationship to it. The Jewish Bible’s “God” was imagined by an ancient pre-scientific people to be a rational “person” who created all things and who made the sun shine and the rains fall.  But we have known for a long time now how things are really formed and why weather phenomena occur, and it has nothing whatever to do with the will or action of any “god-person.”  Things come into being through the energy of existence evolving new organisms through the struggle to survive … and all natural events have natural causes — they happen because they have to happen; there is no one making them happen and there’s no one who can stop them from happening. The cosmological “God” of the bible that ran all natural phenomena by fiat does not exist … and we know now it never did. 

The Greek philosophers many centuries before the time of Jesus began to associate existence with “God.”  It was they who first floated the hypothesis that “God” was the “being” in which all things were immersed and by which they themselves existed.  The two traditions merged.  The Mediaevals who inherited that merged tradition, following Plato, thought of “being” as an idea and “God” as a Subsistent Idea (“being,” esse in se subsistens), a Mind full of ideas.  Ideas and minds were spiritual “things” — incorporeal, immaterial, interpenetrable — but “things” nonetheless that existed on their own.  They thought of all of reality as “participating” in the idea of existence, which they defined as a self-subsistent entity and called it “God.”  All other things resided in that “God”-idea-entity as in a matrix. 

In the 14^th century, when Ockham and other logicians demolished the Platonic assumptions about subsistent ideas, the west was left without a definition of “idea” which would allow for metaphysical “participation.”  Ideas, he said, following Aristotle, existed only in the mind.  The “divine immanence” characteristic of the Platonic universe was no longer possible because it had no metaphysical ground to support it.  ”God,” therefore, conceived as that “idea-thing” “in which all things live and move and have their being,” disappeared … and, for the last 800 years, all things, including “God,” have been conceived as having their own separate existence. “God” was one discrete entity among many.

But in place of the idealist mediaeval conflation, I am proposing a cosmo-ontology in which we look at the phenomenon of space-time and the variety of material forms that populate the universe as the product of an existential energy that is the constitutive essence of matter.  Matter is not an inert “substance;” matter is energy.  Matter is the very energy to exist. 

Energy is not a “thing.”  It is power — a potential for activity that may take any number of shapes, forms, and be observable and measurable by a great variety of methods.  But whatever form it takes — and some forms, like dark energy, may be undetectable with current instruments — it is still material energy.  There is no “spirit” as a separate genre of being.  There is no other world ruled by reason and peopled by minds with ideas.  There is only material energy.  Whatever “God” there is, is part of this one material universe.  Material energy is existence.  The energy of matter is the energy to exist.  They are one and the same thing. 

Matter’s existential energy, therefore is responsible for the form of every structure, property, force and particle in the universe.  Our organic human conatus, which we have identified as the source of our existential awe, addiction and vulnerability, is in fact a highly developed example of the material energy of the universe.  The human organism is simply one of the forms that material energy has evolved in its quest to continue to exist and survive.  Human organisms, insofar as they have conscious self-awareness, directly experience the existential energy of matter as their conatus.  The human love of life and quest for immortality, the drive to survive and the anxiety over its loss, the communitarian instinct and thirst for justice, is the human expression of matter’s existential energy. These feelings are not optional; they are not repressible; they are not fantasies and they cannot be dismissed or expunged as illusions. They are the very nature of the material reality that makes up our bodies.  It is what makes us what we are, and it is what drives us to do what we do.

Since religion claims to respond to these very same human feelings, drives and desires, it would seem that “God” and matter’s existential energy are each used to explain the same phenomena even though expressed in entirely different ways.  Traditional pre-scientific religion has projected the imagery of a personal humanoid source of human existence.  This “God” has traditionally been the focus of the human gratitude for life, aspirations for immortality and the struggle for a community of justice.  But what we really owe everything to, as a matter of indisputable fact, is the existential energy of matter.  Is “God” a metaphor for that?  (Or is it a metaphor for “God”?)  Whatever. It is matter’s energy that is responsible for every form and feature of the human being and that includes our peculiar “sense of the Sacred.“   Everything that was claimed to have originated in the benevolent self-donation of a supernatural “creator-person” is now known to be the product of matter’s existential energy.  

Some say that they must be one and the same thing.  I am inclined to agree.  But the ways they are described are vastly different.  For traditional Religion, “God” is an individual personal entity, an independent rational mind separate from other things.  But matter’s energy is not different from anything.  In a manner that is reminiscent of the “participation” of Plato’s subsistent ideas, it is not a separate entity.  But make no mistake.  Matter’s energy is not an idea, and it is not spirit. There is only one “thing” in existence, and it is matter.

“Person” and subjectivity

Humans cannot be neutral or detached about their existence.  This is not a moral choice or aesthetic preference.  It is part of our material organism. The conatus virtually guarantees that people will try to relate to whatever gave them existence and “designed” their human nature. These worshipful feelings have given rise to the image of a “parent-God” who becomes the object of human affections.  But there’s a roadblock preventing the identification of material energy with religion’s “God.”  It is that material energy is considered an utterly impersonal random phenomenon devoid of reason, intention, choice and benevolence.  It is ima­gined as it appears in its most primitive forms — at the level of sub-atomic particles.  Humans cannot relate to non-persons.  It is probably the most serious practical objection people have to this whole approach.

At the heart of the problem, in my opinion, is the equation of subjectivity with human personality.  They are not the same thing, and, on background, people subconsciously acknowledge it.  Let me explain: people relate to animals (their pets, for instance) whom they do not hesitate to describe as having a “lot of personality,” or some such other term, while still denying they are “persons.”  Clearly in these cases they have encountered something that they recognize as a subjectivity to which they can relate and very often with deep affectivity.  In the case of these animals, the possibility of relationship does not devolve upon some abstract definition of “person” requiring the presence of our human level of rationality, but rather an interactive interpersonal experience whose metaphysical basis we do not question.  The key is intersubjectivity, or in the terms that we use for such matters, a relationship with what are not “persons.” 

The mystics provide the best evidence that material energy is such a subjectivity because they insist they have a relationship with the source of their own selves that is grounded not in abstract propositions about a clearly defined supernatural “something,” but rather an intersubjective experience that transcends all conceptual categories and is rooted in the experience of their own existence.  The mystics categorize the relationship, without apology or hesitation, as one of “love.”  But they never insist that it is rational.  It corroborates the ancient claims of an unlimited wellspring of generous self-donation from which all things have emanated … and a vast unbounded matrix “in which all things live and move and have their being” … a matrix in which the mystics made a most profound and unexpected contact with their own selves.  Their descriptions remain always undefined except for the interactive features and so there is no temptation to take them as propositions that define a separate independent entity.  While many of them professed belief in the traditional western “God,” others from other traditions did not.  But in all cases they had recourse to terminology that expressed their experience in shocking, image-shat­ter­ing metaphors that clearly eschew any suggestion of specificity or humanoid personality: “cloud of unknowing,” “darkness,” “gentle breeze,” “emptiness,”  a lover who is like “an army set in battle array,” and who visits “on a dark night.” These characterizations are hardly objective descriptors, and are rather obviously designed to evoke an exotic relationship.

Once we enter the realm of love, all categorical definitions recede into the background and are superseded by the dynamics and metaphors of relationship.  “Knowledge” itself takes on a different meaning altogether in this context.  To “know” someone … whether it’s a friend or an enemy, a pet or farm animal, or for that matter, even oneself … is not scientific “knowledge.”  It is a recognition that is not dependent on its categorical  component.  In the iconoclastic words of Wittgenstein, it is “nonsense” because it is not saying anything “sayable.”  The only “truth” to be had and verified is totally contained within and limited to what is “known” in the relationship and through the mutual recognition of the “subjects” involved.  They alone know what they mean when they speak of “knowing” one another.  There is no other data or evidence available.  No “third-party” verification is possible.  What is known from within a relationship cannot be known outside the relationship. A quasi-scientific description of the dynamics operative in relationships, as I might be accused of attempting here, is not the content I am speaking about, nor is some psychological profile or even an informal gossipy characterization.  The “knowledge” is not “what” we know but rather the direct, unmediated encounter-based recognition of this individual — unique and knowable only in mutual subjective interaction.

It simply cannot be assumed that “God,” for those mystics who use the word, is the same as the “God” of western religion.  I would argue that, with all due respect to their institutional loyalties, it is not.  But aside from that issue, here I would ask a slightly different question: is the non-calculating self-donating creative generosity of material energy what the mystics were really naming with their poetic metaphors?  According to the criteria I am proposing in this sketch, there is no way to know until one begins to relate, because this is the kind of “knowledge” that is only had in relationship.  In other words, we will have to find out for ourselves.  But it shouldn’t be that difficult.  After all, matter’s energy is that “in which we live and move and have our being.” We are “matter’s energy” doing what it does.  Does the “senseless” creative generosity we experience in our own improbable existence — this “amazing, mysterious stroke of luck” — correspond to our inner identity and deepest aspirations?  Nothing could be more familiar or easier to check.  Taste and see.

Tony Equale

Jesus or “Christ”?

Jesus or “Christ”

Was it necessary that Jesus become a Greek “god-man” to accomplish his mission?  For those who feel it was important that, however stripped of the integrity of his vision, Jesus needed to be projected universally and transhistorically, then certainly, without the leverage of some supernatural illusion or another, he would have remained simply a Jewish visionary known only to his close circle of friends and those they may have been able to convince to follow his “way.”  He might never have become the Pantocrator , the celestial model and guarantor of Roman Imperial power, and the “judge of the living and the dead.” 

This is an argument used to justify the necessity of the “god-man” upgrade of Jesus in Paul.  But, even in its best version, it rests on the conviction that Jesus was important for something other than his message and living example … something, we must realize, that he himself never wasted his breath on.   The relegation of Jesus’ message and example to secondary importance has been the leitmotiv of Christianity since the letters of Paul.  Jesus was significant, according to this view, not for what he said, how he lived or what he tried to accomplish in this world, but for what his death achieved in another world.  The final step in the ladder of super­natural upgrades was the homoousion ofConstantine making Jesus God Almighty in person: the ultimate distortion.  To Jesus it would have been blasphemy. 

It seems to me this entire line of thought is suggesting that for the sake of institutional growth and influence, regardless of the human deformity it propagated, we have to respect these false supernatural mystifications.  I reject that.  I do not feel that illusion of any kind is ever advantageous much less necessary.  It is not even morally acceptable … in fact I think those who promote such things are committing crimes against humanity.  I give the actual perpetrators of these illusions the benefit of my doubt about their intentions: I assume they were mystified themselves and sincerely passed on to others what they had come to believe. 

Someone may then ask how Jesus’ message could possibly have been transmitted without using such mechanisms … and I would answer: through the faithful repetition of his words and deeds in writing or by word of mouth, and by the example of those who follow his counsels … the same way the Buddha’s human message was transmitted for many centuries before his deification by Mahayanism.  Jesus himself relied on nothing but his words and his example.  The projection of Jesus as a transhistorical divine “personage” in support of an inhuman doctrine that deforms and subjugates human beings is of no value to anyone.  

Who was Jesus?

Jesus was a human being.  What was “divine” about him, metaphorically speaking, was the superlative development of the same humanity that each of us was born with.  Jesus was not only a human being, he was a great human being … and by “great” I am not referring to the notoriety, popularity or influence he achieved.  I mean he was a compassionate, loving, and courageous visionary whose simple wisdom, captured in his words and way-of-life, has inspired people for thousands of years to cherish their humanity and care for one another. 

And Jesus was a Jew.  He lived in an historical context in which the concept Messiah (Christ) was fully alive and heuristic.  He may even have thought of himself in those terms, though most commentators say he did not.  What exactly Messiah may have meant to Jesus, however, seems to be different from what it meant to many of his contemporaries.  Paul’s interpretation, for one, was intentionally (and poetically) conflated with the Greek category of “divine-human hero” as exemplified in the Mystery religions.  Some such category of “lesser divinity” in the Greek idiom is the only possible way that Paul could have conceived Jesus’ as “god.”  For Paul was also a Jew, and placing any human on a par with “God” would have been an unthinkable blasphemy for him as it would have been for Jesus.   Nevertheless, three hundred years later Paul’s “Christ” was in turn upgraded under pressure from the Roman Emperor to absolute equality with “God” — something Paul would not have countenanced.  Arius – following Clement and Origen — correctly understood the Pauline concept of the Christ as creature, and so did many others.  That was proven by the more than a century it required for the Emperor’s Legions to exterminate this “heresy” which was held by half the Christian world.  Constantine’s Greco-Roman restatement of “Messiah” entirely eradicated the humanity of Jesus … and the mythopoeia of Paul’s “hero” became increasingly lost in a culture that saw literal, factual and rational truth to be the only “truth” there was.  Jesus was no longer a “god,” he was God.

Very few Christians are happy discovering that to do what Jesus wanted would mean living a universalized and humanized Judaism.  It might be a shock to learn that for Jewish Jesus, “Christianity” was not what he had in mind at all, and in fact there are some features in it that he would have found contrary to his vision and still others he would have called blasphemous and rejected outright.  Few Christians would accept being Jews … never mind that Jesus was one. 

 Is Catholicism capable of lending and bending itself — its traditions, its liturgy, its magisterium — to the obvious ecumenical implications of a Jesus-based universalism inspired by Jewish tradition?  Are we today, in other words, any more disposed to follow Jesus  and not our own institutional inte­r­ests than Constantine (or Paul)?  Or are we ready, as so many have been throughout our history, to exploit rather than explore the human depth of a message and a life-style that continues to inspire awe across the globe?

There’s a reason for that universal appeal.  Jesus’ utter simplicity and his loving acceptance of all may very well be exactly  what we do not want — and therefore cannot permit ourselves to hear.

Paul and the Mysteries

Paul and the Mysteries

The city of Eleusis in ancient Greece was 14 miles west of Athens overlooking the Saronic Gulf.  It was famous throughout antiquity as the site where the rituals celebrating Demeter’s rescue of Persephone from the underworld were celebrated.  They were known as the Eleusinian Mysteries and were performed there from at least 700 bce until they were officially shut down by the Christian Emperor Theodosius in 392 ce.  The rituals re-enac­ted the descent of the goddess of grain into the underworld in search of her daughter, and her return to life which brought life back to earth.  It had originally been an earth-fertility rite bearing the same burden of “renewing the seasons” as those of Isis and Osiris of Egypt, Damuzi of Mesopotamia, Adonis in Syria, and others.  All these ancient rebirth-of-life rituals were celebrated throughout the Empire and came to be sublimated into the human quest for immortality through the symbolic participation in the death and resurrection of a divine-human “hero” who was called “lord.” The cults of Orpheus and Dionysus were local variants on the rites ofEleusis. They were all called “Mystery” religions.

The word “mysterion” is Greek and means “symbol.”  It has been translated since ancient times by the latin word sacramentum.  “Mysteries” were liturgies of participation whereby individuals, through the symbolic re-enactment of events, were believed to become part of their death-con­quering “lord” and, suffused with her/his power to rejuvenate life, achieved immortality.  

Paul was a resident of the Greek city of Tarsus in the present day Turkey and a Roman citizen.  He was a Jew by birth, a pharisee by choice and training, and a tent-maker by trade.  But whatever else, he was a literate Greek in a Greek world.  Because of their continuous age-old presence in Greek life the Mysteries were more than familiar to him.  There is ample evidence in his letters that he incorporated the essential spirit of those ancient and very widespread mediterranean religious practices into the ritual program he established for the communities he founded.  Christians “died” with their lord, Jesus, through baptism; they were incorporated into him and became members of his body.  They were nourished with his own flesh and blood and would rise from the dead just as he rose.

Paul’s bi-cultural background put him in a unique position to translate the essential elements of the Jesus-event from a Jewish idiom into the Mystery terms that would appeal to his Greek contemporaries.  The formulas expressed in his letters, whether he was solely responsible for them or not, brought together three things: (1) the expectations expressed in Jewish categories of messianic “redemption” which many Jews found “foretold” in the scriptures, (2) Greek aspirations for immortality represented by the Mystery Religions, and (3) the message, life and death of Jesus.  The point I am after is that the interpretation of Jesus’ significance did not come from an exhaustive examination of Jesus’ own declared intentions, teach­ings and life style, but from the religious needs, assumptions and expectations of the com­mu­nities who embraced him as their teacher. 

Jews who were convinced that the messiah’s arrival was imminent also had clear expectations — gleaned from the scriptures — about what that had to mean in Judaic terms.  The Greeks for their part were obsessed with immortality.  Their religious conviction, that it was achievable through incorporation into the life of a dying-and-rising “hero” through ritual re-enactment, provided the paradigm into which Paul inserted the Jewish Messianic covenant-event.  The pressure for “covenant-messiah” from the Jewish tradition and “divine-human-immortality” from the Greek, inevitably meshed the two.  In Paul’s hands, Jesus became Lord and Christ, a “god-man” who conquered death, and by incorporation into his “mysteries” his followers, too, gained immortality.

Jesus as role and function

It is not insignificant that the proper name “Jesus” is never used alone by Paul to refer to the “founder” of his religion.  The name is always accompanied by “lord,” which was the common title given to the hero of the Greek Mysteries, or “christ” which translates Jewish “messiah.”  Both are not names but titles, labels — the descriptors of a role or function.  It was a transference that was so common that Tacitus in his Annals  thought Jesus’ name was “Christos;” obviously that was all he ever heard.  Such a shift from personal name to soteriological function puts on open display the depersonalization of Jesus and the subordination of his personal message and life style to the categorical functions of the religions to whose agenda he was harnessed.  That Jesus’ own vision might have been at odds with Jewish covenant imagery on the one hand, and Greek polytheistic aspirations for immortality on the other, was disregarded if not suppressed.  What we have in Paul’s version of Christianity is a syncretism between Judaic and Greek religious idioms that bypasses the integral message of the man — Jesus — who was the catalyst that inspired them.  Jesus, in other words, was used to promote projects that were not actually his, and with which he may not have entirely agreed.

It should be emphasized at this point that I am talking about developments within the first generation after Jesus’ death.  I am not yet considering the massive deformations that occurred 300 years later when the political needs of the Roman Empire hijacked Christianity and turned it into “Catholicism,” skewing doctrine to such an extent that the spirit of Jesus’ vision was barely discernible.  Roman Imperial captivity eliminated Jesus’ humanity altogether, turned him into Pantocrator,  the ruler-”God” who judges the living and the dead, and set up a quid pro quo of salvation-for-obedi­ence based on a legalist morality monitored by a wrathful deity who demanded baptism into the Empire’s “Church” as the one and only way to avoid eternal torment.  Infant baptism became the common practice; without it unbaptized babies were sent directly to hell by a monster-”God.”  Upper Class hierarchical authority usurped all liturgical functions, women were sidelined, and all religious expression other than the official version approved by the State was persecuted to extinction.  Roman harassment and pogroms of Jews and “heretics” began only in Christian times and were even encouraged by bishops.  Jesus’ popularity was exploited by those who used him for their own purposes, and in the offing, the very humanity, simplicity and compassion that was the basis of his appeal was made secondary to other “more important” values.

Plato, the Mysteries and Christianity

The ancient Mysteries were religious rituals that worked in tandem with the official state cult of the  gods of the mediterranean pantheon.  They were the re-enactment of mythic events done by human “heroes” who were able to manipulate the gods and achieve immortality for humans because of their super-human abilities.  But it always remained an achievement; it was not something to which humans had a right.  The human heroes became immortal by achievement, only the gods were immortal by nature.

The Mystery religions were part of the warp and woof of ancient mediterranean culture from before historic times and they were considered sacred by people of all classes.  Their focus on immortality served as a stimulus to the philosophical efforts of Plato in the 4^th century bce who began a rational enquiry into the meaning of human life with immortality as the governing idea.  Plato became convinced that the origins of humankind were rooted in a world of spirit where mortal matter did not exist and hence nothing died.   

Platonic theory offered “doctrines” about natural immortality which contradicted the central premise of the Mysteries.  Plato concluded that human beings were born with an immortal soul because they were made of spirit, not matter.  Immortality in this scheme did not need to be won, humans were born immortal.  Human persons were really spiritual “souls” trapped in material bodies.  Their “soul-selves” would live on after death in the other world.  The earliest Christian apologists, working from the Mystery paradigm established by Paul, rejected the doctrine of the immortal soul as a pagan belief for it would have rendered the resurrection meaningless.  The earliest Creeds which proclaimed belief in the “resurrection of the body” echoed that world-view.

For a long time Platonic philosophy remained an esoteric pursuit of the educated classes; its tenets were not familiar and accessible to all and it never had a ritual program.  The Mysteries were a religion, Platonism was not.  Paul’s use of the Mystery genre as the scaffolding for his message reflects the fact that he was not addressing the class of people who had accepted Platonic philosophy in place of the traditional cults.  And when he did venture into the world of the philosophers, as we see in his discourse at the Areopagus in Athens, the philosophy he alluded to was not Platonism but Stoicism.  To my mind it is quite significant that it was not until Athenagoras’ Apology, a century and a half after Paul’s letters, that there begins to appear evidence of the presence of Platonic elements in the Christian world-view.  But it took almost another century, with the writings of Clement of Alexandria and his disciple Origen, for the Platonic features to predominate in Christian thought.  This tells me that Christianity slowly penetrated the upper classes.  When it did, their prestige and the normal instinct of lower class people to defer to them, their wealth and power, their education and their ideas, meant that Christian “doctrine” ultimately came to be expressed in Platonic categories and controlled by the elite.  By the 4^th century of the common era Christianity had virtually become the ritual expression of Platonism.  This represented a sea-change from Paul’s version of Christianity.  Immortality in this new scheme no longer had to be won and so Christianity no longer needed a human hero.  From being a “god-man” Jesus became just “God,” of the “same substance” as the Father.   The preoccupation of the individual  shifted from achieving immortality to what kind of life she would have after death: “what world — heaven or hell — will I end up in”?  Torment or bliss for the “soul-self” turned the Pauline quest for integral bodily immortality obtained by immersion in Jesus’ heroic human sacrifice, into the quest to avoid punishment for my disembodied spirit by gaining grace through receiving the sacraments and obeying the law.

The sacraments, which were originally conceived in imitation of the Greek Mysteries provi­ding an immersion (baptism) and ritual re-enactment (eucharist) into the death-conquer­ing divine-human “Lord Jesus,” morphed into the mechanical (ex opere operato) delivery-system of a quasi-quan­ti­fied “grace” which guaranteed reward in heaven.  Such a change from free communal participation to individual self-interested accumulation, besides encouraging the formation of pusillanimous personalities, also meant a new power concentration in the hands of the “distributors” — those who controlled the mechanisms of salvation — the upper class hierarchy who insisted that they alone were authorized  to “administer” the sacraments.     

The Mysteries, resurrection and the theory of the two worlds

So we see there were a series of modulations occurring over hundreds of years that radically transformed Christianity.  Jesus’ vision of the free forgiveness and unconditional love of our “Father,” ritualized in a baptism of conversion and a shared meal among equals symbolizing an earthly morality of love and compassion, was ultimately distorted into a stratified mechanical system for the disbursement and accumulation of an imaginary other worldly currency.  This “grace” was conceived as a magic “something” that supposedly enabled compliance with an otherwise impossible morality and provided the wherewithal to avoid damnation in the other world to which we returned after death.  This distribution system was under the control of overseers from the upper classes identified with the slave-based stratifications of the Roman Empire and fully complicit with its theocratic claims and imperial projects.  And the first decisive step away from Jesus’ earthly vision and into the “two world” fantasy can be found recorded in the letters of Paul, whether he was primarily responsible for them or not, in his articulation of the Jesus-event as the achievement of immortality in the idiom of the Mystery religions.

The still unresolved controversies among Christian scholars about whether the resurrection of Jesus was literal or not have been nourished by the suspicion that the Mystery religion paradigm might have driven the interpretation of the “experiences of the risen Jesus” more than we would like to admit.  And if, besides impelling belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus, the Mysteries were the influence that encouraged Plato to look for a solution to human origins and human destiny in a spiritual “other world,” then they also help explain the metaphysical “dualism” that dominated Christianity and from there western culture for two millennia.  Given the cultural importance of the Mysteries in Greek life, these developments may have been inevitable under any circumstances.  That Pauline Christianity became the vehicle of this dispersion may only have been a quirk of history.  But what is more important to us than the vagaries of western culture is what got by-passed in all of this: the message of Jesus.

The legacy of the man Jesus seems to have been determined more by those who exploited his magnetism than by any serious attempt to collect, thoroughly analyze and put into practice his suggestions for a simple program of human living.  To this day, the sayings, parables and personal interactions of this unimposing and uncredentialled … possibly even illiterate Jewish peasant … continue to inspire awe at the depth of his humanity.  Jesus, as his Jewish brothers would say, was a mensch.  Gleaning his words embedded in the highly theologized narrative accounts of the gospels and identifying his personal message is not an easy task.  But luckily, according to Jesus, we have more to go on than just his own words.  We have the promptings of our own human hearts which he said would guide us to know what “God” is like and how to imitate “him.”

… “If even you know how to give good things to your children, how much more does your Father who is in heaven.”  … “Look at the lilies of the field.  They neither toil nor do they spin, yet not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”    ” … love your enemies … be like your Father in heaven who makes the sun shine on the good and the bad, and the rain fall on the just and the unjust.”  ”… Father … forgive our offenses, as we forgive those who offend us.” 

There’s a “theology” here that is very different from those that have been elaborated in his name.  it’s not complicated at all.  Try it … taste and see … it’s very simple, and it works.

A New “Covenant”?

Paul and Law

In his letter to the Romans chapters 1 to 8, Paul argues that, as a salvific instrument, the “law” has been transcended; we are “saved” by grace not by the works of the law.  By “law,” of course, he means the Jewish “law,” the Torah, which includes all the observances of Judaism; and by “grace” he means the unconditional love of “God.”  Paul’s formula was an attempt to translate his vision of the Jesus-event into the terminology of the Judaic “covenant.”

The Torah was understood to embrace not only ritual and dietary commands but the moral law as well. That fact makes Paul’s presentation at first reading somewhat confusing because he seems to be saying that morality is no longer an essential part of our relationship with “God.” An interpretation of his thought based on this misperception was apparently so widespread during his lifetime that Paul felt he needed to correct it; and he did so twice in that letter by asking, rhetorically, “should we then sin so that grace may abound”?

Certainly, it is confusing that he is thinking at one moment of the Jewish religious observances and at another of basic morality without making any distinctions. But I think the major source of the confusion comes from a much deeper place. Paul is trying to describe a “new” relationship to “God” using the category of “law” and his efforts are directed at showing how the Torah is not abrogated but rather fulfilled by the death of Christ — fulfilled to such an extent that “salvation” itself no longer needs to be won by behavioral compliance, only accepted … in faith.  It was Jesus’ death, according to Paul, that “won salvation.”

While that formulation appears coherent on the surface, it is potentially self-contra­dic­tory because “faith” in this scheme can easily become a new “observance” that returns the supposedly unconditional relationship to quid pro quo status as we see actually happened with many fundamentalist Christian churches. “Salvation,” in this scheme, still needs to be “won,” and “faith” is simply the “new Law” that must be obeyed if we are to win it.  I believe this misrepresentation of Paul’s meaning and intention results from his attempt to show that there is not just a personal  but a categorical continuity between Judaism and his vision of Christianity; hence the term “new covenant.”  But I claim that there is no such continuity.  Whatever continuity there is, is a continuity of search and growth in understanding, not in conceptual structure.  Paul’s explanation results in an incoherence that is not just a matter of expression, but rather of a fundamental disparity of ideas.  Romans tries to sustain two contrary theological visions that are not compatible with one another, and the attempt to synthesize them does not work. This may require some unpacking.

On the “covenant” side of Paul’s vision is the notion of quid pro quo.  It is built on the imagery of relationship as a “contract” between two mutually distinct entities — “God” and man — with “salvation” (meaning “life”) in the balance for humankind.  This was the traditional Hebrew tribal agreement with Yahweh.  And the “grace” or Christian side conceives “salvation” (now “immortality”) as gratuitous and unconditional; “salvation,” in other words, is already guaranteed. Therein lies the disjunction.  I claim you cannot have both.  The unconditionality of “God’s” love — the core of Jesus’ message — is vitiated if “salvation” is ever in question, no matter what the terms and conditions.  If you are serious about unconditionality, then you are seriously challenging any quid pro quo character you would claim for the relationship. You cannot have both unconditional love, and a conditional salvation … but with Paul’s approach you cannot avoid it.

The root of the problem, I submit, is that Paul is trying to express Jesus’ message of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness with categories developed for a quid pro quo contractual relationship as contemplated by the historic “covenant” with Israel.  Paul is using “covenant” imagery to convey a meaning to which it no longer applies.

What happened?

What happened, I believe, is this: Jesus, following the lead provided by Job and the prophets, came to see that God is unconditional love.  Without explicitly criticizing the old contractual imagery, Jesus invited his fellow Jews to lives of unconditional love in imitation of their “Father.”  But, without being expressed, what that had to mean was that the “covenant” as conceived by Judaism had to have been a fantasy all along; in other words, it never existed — there never was  any “contract.” That implies, therefore, that the vision of “God” projected by the traditional tribal contract does not and never did exist. The categories of autocratic demand and unquestioning obedience that were characteristic of the monarchical societies of the ancient near east were erroneously applied to the relationship with Yahweh; it is completely understandable, but, Jesus realized, nothing could be further from the truth.  He dealt with it charitably: he didn’t criticize, he simply dropped it.

Paul, for his part, in trying to systematize his vision, is clearly not willing to declare the entire Jewish tradition a gross mistake.  He is determined to identify Jesus as the full flowering of Judaism.  And while Jesus himself, from his own point of view, may have agreed with that conclusion, I believe Paul’s reassessment of the “covenant” was not nearly as radical as Jesus’ unspoken version.  As far as the old “contract” imagery was concerned, Jesus was able to “forget about it,” Paul was not.  Paul would insist that before Jesus came, the “God” of Judaism was correctly perceived and accurately characterized by the Jews as having a contractual relationship with them.  But that forces him to say that  because of the death of Jesus “God’s” attitude to us changed from the old “covenant” demand-for-compli­ance to a “new” one requiring only faith.  Jesus’ approach, in contrast, by-passing covenant language altogether, requires no change in “God” at all.

Furthermore, it was inconceivable to Paul that such a profound change in “God” (as he imagined) could have taken place without being occasioned if not caused by some historically transforming event; and that event could not have been something as insubstantial as a mere insight into the eternal loving character of “God.” He needed something more concrete and “efficacious” and it was his “experience” of the risen Jesus that gave him what he needed.  The resurrection retrospectively revealed that it was the death of Jesus, not a more accurate understanding of “God,” that was a transcendent event and changed the mind of “God.”

What we have here, therefore, is a profound difference of theological vision.  Paul’s convoluted pharisaic theologizing, by insisting on interpreting the Jesus event in the terms and categories of Judaism, ended up ironically muting Jesus’ vision and allowing for the Christian regression to the very quid pro quo relationship that he had sought to transcend.  For Paul, Jesus’ “sacrificial death” provided for the whole of humanity whatever the observance of the Torah was supposed to have achieved.  Subsequent generations, however, made faith (for protestants) and membership in the community of faith (for catholics) necessary conditions for access to “God’s” “new” attitude.  Quid pro quo remained the leitmotiv of the relationship with “God” and  Jesus’ vision of a loving “Father” got lost.

Cosmo-ontology and the existential energy of matter

Is there some way of coming at this whole question without using “covenant” categories, which we now recognize by Paul’s own intentions to be misleading? I believe the metaphors of Judaism, because they were taken literally, misled Paul and they will mislead us, unless they can be dispassionately evaluated by beginning on some other non-religious ground. I believe that none of the metaphors of religion should be given literal status.  They are all, I contend, the poetic reprise of a more prosaic “impersonal” reality.  I suggest the following scientific-philosophi­cal starting point that can be understood as the factual ground of the metaphors of religion.

I propose that “reality” is, first, accurately apprehended and described by science; … and secondly then, science’s measured perceptions are given their primary interpretation by a philosophy that works closely with science.  It concludes that “reality” (“being,” if you will), is the existential energy of matter.  Nothing exists that is not matter’s energy.  This “stuff” of which all things are composed is not an inert, lifeless “substance,” but rather an effusive dynamism radiating an irrepressible energy to exist, to be.  This energy is responsible for all evolutionary development in the universe.  It is neither created nor destroyed.  It has “created” all things … and in it all things “live and move and have their being.”

That energy evolved into human form in us and is internally experienced as our conatus, the love of our own selves expressed in the uncontrollable drive to survive.  It is responsible for our “personalities” as self-identifiable centers of desire and the continuity of organic experience.  We are inescapably ecstatic over this “self-conscious existence” which makes us to be-here and to be us.  That inner self-embrace erupts into a spontaneous awe and dread (love of life and fear of its loss) which has in the past been metaphorically activated and expressed in the legends, taboos, commandments and ritual observances of religion.  Religion has generally assumed there was “someone” out-there, a “person” like us, to thank, placate and cajole in order to insure the maintenance of this existence.  But while we have since discovered that there is no one like that out there, the assumption was not pure unfounded projection.  It was grounded in the experience of material existence as emanating our own organic identity even while clearly transcending it, since it also emanates everything else we have ever experienced.  This energy is everywhere.  This energy is everything.  We are all made of matter’s existential energy.

So we hit a brick wall in our search for that “someone.”  Even though this existential energy transcends us in everyway, we know there is no identifiable single entity outside-of-us  — no rational “God” as we have understood the term — responsible for our being-here.  Existential energy is everything including us; it was here before us, and will be here when our personal confluence of particles loses its organic coherence-as-self and disappears.  It is precisely this immanent transcendence — this common and universal possession of the energy of matter by all things — that makes it impossible to separate “material energy” from myself.  Without that separation, there can be no “relationship” as we understand the term, as between persons.  There is no clear and unambiguous gratitude, no quid pro quo of any kind; for what I am attempting to relate to is in fact what constitutes my very self.

I claim that it is this common possession and personal appropriation of the living energy of mat­ter  that Jesus, following his Jewish tradition, perceived and poetically described as the uncondi­tional bene­volence of a loving “Father” who was the real source of his “DNA.”  Paul, for his part, even though he was a follower of Jesus, as in other cases did not use Jesus’ metaphor. Instead of “Father,” Paul chose to employ the tradition­al metaphors of the Jewish “covenant,” and tried to articulate existence as a “relation­ship” be­tween “persons” which has “divine command” and “human obedience” as its terms.  He tried to fit the hand of “unconditional love” into the glove of “com­­mand and obedience” and it will not fit.  Granted that both meta­phors — Jesus’ “Father” and Paul’s “covenant partner” — erroneous­ly describe an anthro­po­morphic “God,” they are not equally inconsistent with reality.  The universal “benevo­lence” of material energy, which science perceives at a phenome­no­logical level as random and imper­sonal, may poetically and quite appropriately be translated, as Jesus did, to the “unconditional love” of a “parent” to whom we are intimately related — like Father or Mother — without losing its essential uncon­di­tio­n­ality.  But it cannot be read as a covenant of command and compliance … even one where the compliance is considered accomplished by the death of a god, made freely available to all, and appropriated by faith …  for in this case the unconditionality is lost.  The “death” is still required as compliance or “payment.”  The distribu­tion of Christ’s payment might be free, in Paul’s conception, but the payment itself still had to be made, and it was the messiah who was prophesied to make it.  Quid pro quo  ruled, and the entire drama from Adam to Jesus was dominated by the category of obedience.  No wonder “faith” was also misinterpreted as obedience. 

Jesus, I submit, would not have recognized such a “God” as his “Father.”  For Jesus, “God” wanted nothing from us whatsoever.  There was no quid pro quo of any kind.  For Jesus the very idea of “redemption” would have been utterly foreign, and “faith” as “obedience” incomprehensible.

So Paul and Jesus are definitely out of synch with one another in the religious metaphors they used to describe the same phenomenon: our “reality”  — the mystery of material existence.  Jesus’ metaphors, like “Father,” I believe, by avoiding all “scholarly” categories and confining themselves to simple human symbols, hew more closely to reality as science can measure and describe it.  Paul’s theological approach by using traditional religious imagery formed in an ancient tribal context produces a confusion that can undermine the very core of Jesus’ vision.

Redemption?

Jesus and Paul

 What did Paul really think about Jesus? It is strange that he cited Jesus’ words only once in 13 epistles and he never referred to his way of life or anything he did. Perhaps the communities he was writing to all had “gospels” or collections of Jesus’ “sayings” and he didn’t feel he needed to repeat them. But given the practical problems he addressed in those letters, one would think the example of Jesus’ life would have been applicable to a number of issues. But he never says a word about it. For Paul, it seems, it was Jesus’ death, not his life that was important.

But perhaps this strange anomaly has a source and reason. The witnesses to Jesus’ message, his disciples, had to find a way to explain the crucifixion. They clearly had not been prepared for it by Jesus. Christianity, I believe, was born in that search for an explanation. His followers concluded that Jesus’ execu­tion by the Roman occupational forces was not, as it appeared, the defeat of an earthly human project, it was rather the triumphant climax of a “heavenly” cosmic project that was not apparent in Jesus’ life and words. It seems that Jesus’ teaching, work as healer and simplicity of life were all seen by Paul and other Greek Christians as virtually insignificant in comparison with the “work” that “saved” humanity: his death on the cross — the rectification of the cosmic order … reversing the disobedience of Adam … “buying back” the world from Satan … gaining immortality for humankind … redemption!

“Redemption” says in one word what Greek Christianity is all about … in contrast to what Jewish Jesus was all about. Jesus was a Jew. His message was about how Jews should live on earth, not about the Greek obsession with immortality. His life-style was an example of what he preached and that included the way he died. Greek Christians, on the other hand, as evidenced by the letters of Paul, were focused on the fact that Jesus died, and what his death meant to “God” and the cosmic order. For Paul, Jesus’ death changed ”God’s” relationship to us, making us, for the first time, participants in divinity. Jesus, on the other hand, had a different agenda. He was focused on changing our attitude toward “God” making us imitators of divine forgiveness, love and generosity. For Paul, Jesus’ death created a new intimacy with the immortal God, something never heard of before, giving us a share in divine immortality. But for Jesus, his quiet acceptance of death at the hands of the imperial Roman thugs bore witness to an intimacy with “God” that was as old as Judaism itself. Immortality was not the issue for Jesus; trust in his “Father” was. Paul’s vision implied another life after death; Jesus’ vision contemplated turning life on earth into a paradise of justice and love — what he called the “kingdom of ‘God,’” (a term, by the way, that Paul never used). For Paul Jesus’ life was consistent with the transcendent significance of his death. For Jesus, his death was consistent with the simple, trusting, loving way he lived his life.

Here’s the story in a nutshell. At the beginning of the “common era” (ce), a Jewish “messiah” tried to change the world and was killed for it by the foreign empire that occupied and was plundering his land. Today we can appreciate what Jesus was trying to do and so we see it for the human triumph that it really was. We have seen others triumph in like manner: Romero, Bonhoeffer, Gandhi. What Paul may have considered insignificant for “redemption,” we see as the saving power of the struggle for human justice … the only hope for our species and our planet. The Catholic Church’s insistence on the absurd doctrine of “Original Sin” derives from the almost exclusive focus on a belief in Jesus’ supernatural “redemptive” death as opposed to his human message and simple life-style. Other worldly “redemption” has come to dominate wes­tern Christian thinking on who Jesus was and why he was significant for us. That situation has changed in our times. We see things differently. “Salvation” means something utterly human to us. We need to explain the significance of the cross for us … without any metaphysical fantasy about the Garden of Eden, or how Jesus’ death placated and “changed” the attitude of an angry “God.”

Jesus’ changeless “Father”

Jesus’ new understanding of the traditional Covenant — the contract — between Israeland Yahweh did not represent a change in the character of Yahweh; rather it involved a change in the cultural assumptions of the Jewish people. Jesus’ vision of the covenant as love and not a quid pro quo of prosperity for obedience was built precisely on the changeless fidelity of a benevolent “God.” Augustine’s traditional doctrine of “Original Sin,” on the other hand, implies a change in “God’s” relationship and attitude toward us, dependant on human behavior. It imagines this change occurred more than once. “God” changed from love to anger because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden, and then back again from anger to love because of Jesus’ obedience at the crucifixion. But even with that, Augus­tine still could not account for the suffering we endure in life — notwithstanding “redemption” — without positing an enduring anger in “God” that co-exists with his love. By Augustine’s own theological categories this is preposterous.

Jesus saw things very differently from all of that. For him, there was never any change in “God.” What he saw was that his loving “Father’s” unconditional benevolence had never been understood from the very beginning. He made it his mission to correct that misunderstanding and to set his companions and co-religionists straight on what Yahweh was really like. This was not some personal “shtick” of his. It was consistent with a long line of Jewish prophetic teaching focused on the same issue going way back in Jewish history. The quid pro quo “contract” mentality was challenged very early … as early as the Book of Job in the 6^th century bce. Job had a blinding vision of “God’s” superabundant generosity and came to love “God” gratuitously — not holding Yahweh bound to the terms of the contract. It was the beginning of the re-evaluation of the “covenant.”

The Hebrews, like all the peoples of the near east in ancient times, assumed they had a “deal” with their national “god.” Prosperity in return for moral and ritual compliance would presumably enhance Yahweh’s standing among the nations and their gods. Job’s culture-shattering insight broke with that assumption. It was based on a vision of the vastness of creation itself. Yahweh was the overwhelming creative power behind all things that were. There were no other gods. Yahweh had no need of Job’s obedience and ritual sacrifices, and “he” punished no one for “he” forgave without limit. Job realized his suffering did not come from this Yahweh. Once Job saw reality for what it was, his complaints ceased for they had no basis. There was no “deal.” The “deal” was superabundant love.

The prophets, trying to understand the breakdown of the Jewish state, continued Job’s reassessment as they agonized over the utter destruction of the Northern Kingdom and the humiliating exile and decimation of the population of Judahin 587 bce. Where was the traditional “covenant” in all this? The prophets challenged the stock answers viz., that they were being punished for breaking faith with Yahweh. … “No”! the prophets said, “God” loves us no matter what. Despite Israel’s failures, the exile was not the act of an angry “God” who had been denied the blood of sacrifice and obedient submission, but rather the direct consequences of relying on power and wealth in an unjust social order. “I don’t care about your sacrifices,” they poetically imagined Yahweh saying. “What I want is that you treat one another with justice and compassion.” The exploitation of the poor by the rich was always at the center of the prophets’ denunciations, and setting things right was the heart of their vision and their mission.

Taught by Jesus, his disciples developed an awareness of what the entire history of the relationship to Yahweh was saying with an evolving clarity. They were learning at Jesus’ knee that the Covenant — the contract — was not a quid pro quo. It was not about national or personal prosperity in exchange for obedience and ritual compliance. The covenant was simply about love and the unconditional acceptance between God and people — “Father” and children — that necessarily accompanies it. “God” our “Father” loves us unconditionally; we, his children, embrace our provenance, our genetic inheritance, and surrender to love unconditionally just like our “Father.” And just as Job decided to “love” God and accept that “God” loved him despite the overwhelming losses he suffered, Jesus’ death represented the ultimate sign that the relationship to “God” was bedrock — no matter the context — for “God” does not change. For Jesus, as for Job, there was no guarantee of recompense whatsoever, for there was no contract.  Death did not represent a “change” in the relationship with our “Father.” The clearest way to announce that realization definitively was to say that the symbol of our trusting relationship to “God” was Jesus’ death on the cross. Death had no power over the love between “Father” and son.

This is very different from Paul’s interpretation of what Jesus did to “save” us. Paul was changed by what he saw on the road toDamascus. Paul saw a “new” Jesus transformed by death, and decided to live his life based on that Jesus, not the one who walked and died among us whom he never knew. For Paul, death changed Jesus, and Paul believed that “God” changed in response to the death of Jesus. But Jesus would have disagreed. For Jesus “God” does not change. “God’s” love for us does not depend on us or our behavior. There is no law or contract with the creative power of the universe. “God” is not now nor was “he” ever angry with us. There was no “original sin.” There is no Satan who “owns” us. “God” punishes no one and death is a natural part of the gift of life.

From what, then, do we need to be “redeemed” … except our nightmares?

The Humanization of Christian Doctrine (IV)

Mystification

 ”Mystification” is a fundamental operator in human life. It is an application of our “sense of the sacred” to our social structures. We “mystify” ordinary reality and project it to be something “more than human.” Curiously, when things become “more than human” they also pass “beyond our control.” For most of us there’s a serenity that accompanies this recognition. Once it seems that “this is the way things are supposed to be, and there’s nothing we can do about it” we can relax; things are out of our hands.  

 Mystification is a perennial feature of all power relationships. It suggests “this is the way things are supposed to be.” The male’s power over the female was mystified in our culture through the “sacred” submission of the wife to her husband. It was similar for children to their parents, employees to their bosses, a ship’s crew to their captain, citizens to the authorities in a civil community. Obedience is couched in terms of a “sacred relationship” and grudging compliance becomes willing collaboration. “Holy obedience” involving the mystification of the authority figure is as essential in the military as in the monastery. Without it life as we know it would be very different indeed.

 Mystification is not necessarily “oppressive.”  It does not have to imply either blindness or an intention to deceive. It can be taken metaphorically; such  a voluntary self-mystification means people embrace what is known to be a symbol in order to enjoy some benefit that derives from the exercise. The British, for example, sustain the myth of the “divinely appointed” Queen and her family. They know it is not literally true, but choose to have the feelings of national pride and continuity that are associated with royalty and its pompous ceremonies. Judges wear black robes and “all stand” when they enter the courtroom as a symbol of respect for their moral authority. Even television’s “Judge Judy” and “Texas Justice” are treated in like manner. It’s a game, a make-believe that is freely chosen for a reason. With metaphorical mystification, the principals are free and in control of what they are doing. It’s a way of poetizing the importance of our relationships.

Catholic mystification

The authority structures in the Catholic Church depend on mystification too, but Catholic mystification is not metaphorical. It is absolutely literal and has been presented that way with shrill insistence since ancient times. Literalness makes mystification oppressive; it takes away the freedom of the mystified. For it is not their voluntary respect and acquiescence that is being elicited, but rather their submission to “things as they are and are supposed to be.” Let’s see how some of these mystifications evolved and function in Catholic life.

 I want to start with something we are all familiar with. It is a mystification that is currently in transition from literal to symbolic: it is the mystification of “the priest” … which has historically been associated with the literal interpretation of the “real presence” of Jesus in the eucharist.

 At his last supper with his friends the night before he died, Jesus took bread and broke it and said, “this is my body” and as he shared the cup of wine he said, “this is my blood.”  He was clearly using the broken bread and red wine as poetic symbols of his imminent death. The gospel writers all tell us he said “do this in memory of me.” The eucharist is a memorial re-enactment of that moment at the last supper. To claim that Jesus’ words were meant literally is a gross misreading of an obvious poetry. A literal reading is not only dishonest and impossible, it is also misleading, for it overwhelms the symbolism of the shared memorial meal, which was clearly Jesus’ intention. Even Augustine was aware that the belief in the real presence could distract from the primary meaning of the eucharist and warned against it.  And exactly as he feared, the thought that Jesus himself was right there in front of us ultimately came to dominate the Catholic imagination; the symbolism of the memorial meal was lost, and the mass became a “sacrifice.” It was only with the reforms of Vatican II that the symbolism of the meal was brought forward again.

 From the mis-taken literalness of Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine there came a second: that the person who presided over the ceremony — the priest — had to have “supernatural” powers because he effectuated such an astounding transformation: he brought Jesus back to earth. They were both major mistakes. The bread and wine is not literally the body and blood of Jesus and the priest is not someone with supernatural powers. It is clear that the early communities celebrated the eucharist as a meal, and we do not know exactly when the change occurred, but when the bread and wine began to be considered literally the body and blood of Jesus, the eucharist stopped being thought of as a meal and became a “sacrifice” offered to “God.”  The person who played the role of Jesus in the re-enactment also stopped being an ordinary person and became a “priest” who brought “God” to earth with magic words that worked only when he used them and then offered this really present Jesus as a sacrifice “to please and appease God.” 

 It is significant that class stratification was an integral part of this phenomenon.  The control over the eucharist came to be restricted to the bishop who was always a member of the upper class; priests were his agents who served at his pleasure. They were not independent of the bishop in any way. They owed him absolute obedience and their unique powers were conferred on them by the bishop alone. We don’t know exactly when this all happened, for Christianity was originally an egalitarian religion of the poor and leaders were chosen by the community, but when it emerged into the light of day after the Roman persecutions were over 300 years later, all these new features were in place: … the real presence … the mass as sacrifice … and control of ritual by the upper class bishops. None of this existed earlier. And we do not know which came first. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the literal mystifications of the real presence and the super-powers of the priest were modifications devised by the upper class hierarchy to insure control for themselves.  But even if it was an independent development, it served to concentrate control in the hands of the upper class.

Now, what if we were to reverse these mistakes. Notice what happens. First, let’s take the eucharist as a shared meal. “Do this,” Jesus said, “in memory of me.” He didn’t say: “Do this and I will be literally present with you again” which he could have said if that’s what he meant. The presence he spoke of was “in memory.” Christians share their memories of how Jesus lived and what he died for, in order to have his vision live on in them. Jesus’ spirit is not present physically in the church building or the bread and wine, it is present psychologically and voluntarily in the lives of the people who have chosen to remember him. There is no other presence. The meal helps us share our memories and focus our aspirations. We live in the spirit of Jesus and thus “he lives again” in us.

 Now let’s take our idea of the “priest” and return it to its proper place next to the symbolism of the memorial meal. We immediately realize that since the bread and wine is not Jesus magically come to earth again, the “priest” is similarly not a supernatural magician with special powers either, but an ordinary human being who simply has the role, given to him by the community, of performing a memorial ceremony. The priest’s job has to do with memory. It is to remind people of the meaning of the symbolism: who Jesus was, what he taught and why he died the way he did.

What about “sacrifice”?  Isn’t the mass a sacrifice that will guarantee our safety … our “salvation”?  No, that’s the difference between Jesus’ message and the various official religions of his day. Jesus was not conerned with placating any “god,” especially not Yahweh. The “loving Father” of Jesus did not need placating. He was a “God of mercy and forgiveness.” What Jesus taught was that the answer to life is to imitate the generous loving kindness of the One in whom we “live and move and have our being” — our “Father.” Jesus never said we would be saved from death, except metaphorically. What he said was “forgive as you are forgiven, love as you are loved, give as you have been given” and you will be like your “Father.” That is what we remember when we re-enact that meal.

 It should not surpise us then, to learn that the word “priest” originally did not mean “one who offered sacrifice.”  “Priest” comes directly from the Greek word “presbyter” which meant “elder.” It indicates that in the early communities the eucharist was celebrated by older people, as you would expect. That’s all that “priest” meant.  We don’t know when it happened, but it was only much later that we learn that the priest became “someone who offered sacrfice.” We first hear of it after Christianity took over as the official religion of Rome. The Empire demanded a continuity with its pre-Chris­tian practices because that’s what everyone was used to. Sacrifice had to be offered to guarantee divine protection and the success of Rome’s ventures. “Offering Sacrifice” was a Roman state function, it was not originally a Christian category, it was not part of Jesus’ message, not even metaphorically.  It was a “theological adjustment” made by the ecclesiastical authorities that conveniently dovetailed with the requirements of the Empire … it earned the Church all those big basilicas and handsome stipends from the Roman government. It’s no wonder “sacrifice” became the dominant category for understanding the eucharist.

 Jesus said, “do this in memory of me.”  Those christians, women or men who would respond to his request must first realize they have the right to do it.  No special powers are needed.  This sounds simple, but it’s not. For Catholics have been mystified big-time. They have been told for centuries that the eucharist is reserved to magicians — supermen, priests, an elite corps of men who had an eternal “seal” on their souls giving them “power” that no one else had. That eternal seal, as “indelible” as a birthmark and as powerful as Merlin’s wand, could only be gotten through ordination by a credentialled bona-fide upper-class bishop.  

 You must understand the depth of the mystification here. These are not just ceremonial metaphors, a poetic overlay designed to show respect for the important role these men played as priests. They were presented to Catholics as literal metaphysical facts, as real and functional as any iron tool that gives humans the power to do what their hands of flesh cannot. It was the hammer of Thor. Catholics were mystified indeed. If they are to accede to Jesus’ request to “do this in memory of me,” all this must be demystified.  The community designates who will preside over the memorial meal. Catholics, of course, respect whoever is chosen … but that is the extent of legitimate mystification. The rest is pure “hocus pocus.”

 celibacy

 Since the middle ages the mystification surrounding the priesthood has been intensified for Catholics by mandatory celibacy. Celibacy meant these priests could not be married. Not being married became a permanent accompaniment to the elite status conferred by the powers of holy orders. I emphasize “not-married” because it helps gain an insight into the psycho-dynamics of Catholic mystification — what Catholic structures mean and how the Church uses them to project its way of life. All these non-married elite were committed to the “Church” with a total personal dedication. In fact, they had been persuaded that to give oneself in unquestioning obedience to the Church authorities was to give oneself totally to “God.” Please take careful note, there was a double hand-off functioning in the backfield here: … the Church was substituted for “God”… and the ecclesiastical authorities were substituted for the Church. It’s strange that no one seemed to notice the switch.  All magic acts depend upon this kind of dexterity that makes key substitutions without being detected. Celibacy was elicited from “souls” that were said to be the “bride of Christ” but the bodies those souls inhabited were, in fact, wedded to the hierarchy and controlled as by a “husband.”

 Think of it this way. “Celibacy” is really just another kind of marriage. These celibate elites didn’t marry a human being, they married the ecclesiatical authorities and all the powerful reproductive energies of their young bodies were channeled toward generating more offspring for them — the one “Mother” of all … like a beehive or ant colony where sterile workers dedicate their lives to the proliferation, care and feeding of the progeny of the one fertile “Queen.”

 People who marry people are focused on people: … the love and care of their partner … the survival and welfare of their children … food, clothing, shelter … and the equitably shared work-in-community necessary to procure these things for themselves and their neighbors. People who thought they were married to “God,” however, turned their attention to “another world,” a non-existent fantasy universe where human sexuality was supposedly “sublimated” and neutralized by a psycho-erotic relationship with an imagined humanoid “God”-person and its energies placed in service to the ecclesiatical authorities.

 People who married people were never trusted by the hierarchy. Of course not. They were married to someone else. Their loyalties were always supect, for at any moment they might put the interests of their families and villages above the interests of the bishops. The “Queen Bee” wanted only sterile workers for her hive. Other potentially reproductive females and sexually potent males were mercilessly exterminated. “Lay” people — in effect the “married” — in like manner, were marginated, stripped of any respect, responsibility and power, fed only the mystifications that would keep them “hooked:” terrified of an eternity of torture from a monster “Father” whose senseless rage was averted only by the “Mother” who alone could protect her children. The mystifications here would be diabolical, if they weren’t so transparent.

 The arrogation of all Christian rights to the “sacred authority” (the hierarchy) alone, was a key maneuver that established rule by the “elite.” Clerical celibacy intensified the separation between the elite and the ordinary people. But we may notice, celibacy was about marriage, not sex. Sexual failure for celibates was not infrequent, and “forgiveness” was readily available. No priests have ever lost their jobs because of their sexual foibles … no matter how egregious. But if they dared marry, O most heinous of crimes, they were fired immediately and without exception.  Whatever happened to “thou art a priest forever …”?  This remains true even today.  How transparent does it need to be before we “see” it?

 So, it wasn’t “sex” that was the “line in the sand.”  It was marriage. Lay people — family people — were excluded from the workings of Church life, especially the central rituals that nourished and directed spirituality. The very first step in the humanization of Christian doctrine, therefore, is for ordinary people to take back those rights that were ripped-off by the upper-class in a maneuver cleverly concealed by the cloak of social and educational superiority, mystified and emasculated by celibacy.

 Women, especially upper class educated women, were also given the opportunity to serve the hierarchy as celibates. Being not married was an important condition for them as well.  But there was a major difference. Non married women who were dedicated religious were always conspicuously excluded from leadership in the central rituals.  Women could never be priests. How do we explain this?

 Women embodied a heinous sexual lapse that could never be forgiven: they were women, and a woman’s sexual foibles produce children. Once a woman became a mother we know exactly what would happen to her loyalties. Women cannot be trusted where power relations are mystified because women become mothers and are programmed by nature to put life before all else. Men were the preferred victims of ecclesiastical “vampirism,” the blood-sucking expropriation of human energies represented by mandatory celibacy, because men did not have babies … and their “supernatural” loyalties remained intact.  Men were preferred because they could be rendered inhuman … torn from family and clan (and the justice they require) and manipulated at will … whereas women could not.  Hence men were the “chosen ones.”

 Even when it was embraced and lived sincerely, celibacy erroneously evoked the literal existence of another world … not just another dimension in human life … but a “supernatural” world different from this one whose requirements took precedence over life on earth. Celibacy was intended to keep people from loving and caring for what they really are — people who belong to their families and villages, their shared equitable work and their companions — in favor of projecting a non-existent world where solitary individuals will be saved (or punished) as individuals.  “Human Justice” did not matter in that other world.  It tried to get us to love a “God” that was nothing but an image in our heads, and not the real “God” whose existential energy flowers in the family of humankind.  To love an imaginary “God” is to love an imaginary self — a non existent independent “ego” — and not the real self bound in blood to the real human beings who share life together in this valley of tears. For Catholicism, the human family and the sex and marriage that produce it, is the Original unforgiveable Sin … and it was “Eve,” the woman, who was to blame for it all … she tore us from “paradise” and condemned us to live on the earth.

 ”Do this,” Jesus said, “and remember me.” It’s a straightforward request and an invitation; nothing very complicated here at all.  No mystification, no hocus-pocus.   It’s strange.  When the ecclesiastical authorities command, Catholics tremble and obey; they believe any line that’s fed them.  When Jesus invites them to a common meal, they hesitate.  Why is that?  Is there a connection between the two? 

Perhaps we do not yet have the “ears to hear.”

Tony Equale

The Humanization of Christian Doctrine (III)

The Humanization of Christian Doctrine (III)

If the “supernatural,” as I claim, is not a fact, then what do we do with our tradition, which was constructed on belief in the supernatural? Should we destroy it … walk away from it? Are we to say that our people lied, intentionally told us stories that simply weren’t true? I don’t believe two millennia of Christian history can be dismissed as just so much illusion. Ours is not the first generation to set out in pursuit of the meaning of human life and the Mystery of existence. The work and insights of former generations can be found in the residue they left. We have to cherish the efforts of our forebears, notwithstanding the serious emendations that have to be made. I think doctrine should be thoroughly evaluated free of the manipulations of “infallible authority.” The ancient human wisdom embedded there should be identified and separated from the supernatural fantasies that have made it inhuman.

“Supernatural” doctrine, very often, has a deep human significance which only emerges when understood metaphorically. This is not just a “saving of the words.” In many cases, a doctrine’s supernatural formulation was originally the result of the attempt to provide a “philosophical” ground for a natural phenomenon. Ancient philosophy tended toward reification — turning psychological realities into physical or metaphysical “things”. Re-interpreting doctrine metaphorically often returns it to its natural human origins and transforms its meaning.

Certain doctrines, of course, like papal infallibility, are beyond metaphorization. Nothing can be done with them; they must be repudiated and abandoned. But others, like the Incarnation, I believe, derived originally from a deep sense of the goodness of that “in which we live and move and have our being” and its reflection in human holiness / wholeness. They called it “God.” NT authors John and Paul attributed a poetic “divinity” to the extraordinary man Jesus. They saw in it the potential “divinization” of humankind. “God became man,” says the ancient formula, “so that man could become God.” Jesus embodied a “divine” quality that we recognize as human wholeness; he was a “symbol of ‘God.” Recognizing the completely understandable reaction of his awestruck followers who knew him personally, we simply retrace their steps. There is no manipulation here. We can agree with them; Jesus was “simply divine” … in the way that phrase from popular parlance suggests — a remarkably whole human being. And potentially so are we all. That’s not the end of the story; it’s just the beginning. Us “becoming God” is what it’s all about. “God,” i.e., human wholeness: justice, compassio0n, generosity, is at the end of this story, not the beginning.

Evolution, experience and ideas

Christian doctrine reflects the beliefs and cultural assumptions of two thousand years of Western religious experience — humans becoming “God” by becoming whole. Without science for most of that time, Christians were limited to their era’s conceptual categories for explaining their experience of human wholeness..

What was always authentic through all that time, was their experience. In those days, they labeled their experience “supernatural,” and communicated it through certain symbols and legendary stories that were equally “beyond nature.” We may have a similar experience, but, because our tools of interpretation and view of the world are vastly different from theirs, we assign it to different categories, link it to other concrete images and find other ways of narrating the stories. The narrative — the way the story is told — determines how it is understood. All stories can be told, and understood, in different ways.  

Just as clothing changes, languages tastes and customs change, our understanding of our experience changes because our ideas change. Our experiences, however, do not change because our bodies do not change. We remain as always, females and males, children until maturity, sexually reproducing organisms who survive only because of a complex division of labor we call society. Society naturally engenders power gradients among people. The temptation of the powerful to get and keep more for themselves is perennial. Violence in the service of injustice is always a threat, and along with it parallel aspirations for justice and peace. Love and gratitude for life is also a constant, as is anguish and perplexity over disease, suffering and death. The universe is an awesome place; every generation is driven mad with ecstasy over the beauty of our human minds and bodies and the world we live in; and every generation is tortured with fear and pain — disconsolate at the loss of loved ones and harrowed by the tragedies that befall us all. These things do not change. Our experience is fundamentally the same as that of all humankind and that includes the founders of our religious tradition. Organic evolution works on a time-scale that renders the scant two thousand years of Christian history insignificant.

Ideas, on the other hand, do change, and rapidly. The evolution of ideas is very significant and affects doctrine profoundly. Religious interpretations will modulate with changing ideas … unless something intervenes to keep that from happening. If normal doctrinal adjustments are prevented from occurring, there is a toxic backup that ultimately poisons the organism. I contend that Christian doctrine has not been allowed to evolve because the Church projected the illusion that what it taught was infallibly, eternally true. This is not human. We may know where it came from and be inclined to overlook it as an exaggeration, but taken literally it is not human. The Church, ironically, confirms my accusation … because one of its “supernatural” doctrines is that it is literally divine. That is exactly the problem. The Church thinks it is “divine” and therefore what it says cannot change.  But nothing is divine but “God.” The only “divinity” that humans have is their wholeness. The Church is human every bit as much as we are human and Jesus was human. If we seem to be reaping the whirlwind in our time, I submit it’s because we sowed the wind — the claim to be more-than-human. Since evolution is time-related, if you refuse to evolve with your times there comes a point when the accumulated disparities are so overwhelming that the camel collapses under the weight of some “last straw.” Many feel that point was passed a long time ago. The Church, as anyone with eyes can see, is in fact all too human.

A global impact

Everyone has a responsibility to try to humanize the Church, not only Christian believers. The whole world is affected by the colossal obduracy that results from Catholicism’s idolatrous self-projection. For me, the single most egregious example of this is the insane insistence that artificial birth control is intrinsically evil, despite the contrary recommendations of an official Commission composed entirely of Vatican-appointed bishops, theologians and advisers in 1967. The Pope’s solitary decision to reject the Commission’s advice on this question was taken for the sole purpose of maintaining the appearance of an unchanging infallibility. The self-exalting hubris here is evident. This “unchangeable policy” goes to the extreme of condemning the use of condoms in marriage even to prevent transmitting HIV-AIDS. And for a Church that has publicly declared that one of its practical goals is to reduce the number of abortions to a minimum, the condom prohibition wipes out the single most effective way to limit the number of unwanted pregnancies … and unwanted pregnancies are the only reason for abortions. The irrational madness displayed here is so profound, that if we didn’t know the background — the “supernatural” reasons for this stance — it would be totally incomprehensible. It suggests the mania driving it to be of demonic proportions. It is simply not human.

Humanizing the Church

I believe there are some clear goals in the process of humanizing the Church; most of them have already been suggested. There is, of course, the derogation of the claims to infallibility for the pope and the magisterium. It must be clearly acknowledged that there is no infallibility which closes the possibility of doctrinal restructuring or grants the bishops the right to rule without accountability.

The “sacred authority” (hierarchy) limited to the Pope and bishops (and celibate male priests, agents of the bishops) eliminates any authentic contribution from the rest of the Catholic community. Witness the disregard for the Papal Commission mentioned above. This not only prevents change but it invites abuse. It is estimated that there are 1.2 billion (with a “b”) Catholics throughout the world. A paper-thin crust of questionably qualified “bishops,” all appointed by the pope without consultation with the people, autocratically rules over this seething volcano of humanity whose desires for reform are never solicited, and if by any chance expressed, they are ignored.

This affects women most especially. Women are officially and explicitly excluded from the exercise of “sacred authority” for no other reason than their gender. Countries whose laws against gender discrimination apply to all other institutions within its borders, for some reason cannot penetrate the “supernatural” injustice functioning here. With its “doctrinal” subordination of women, the Catholic Church actively fosters attitudes that contradict the intention of the laws of the land — and does it with impunity. The clear and unambiguous words of the Apostle that for the followers of Jesus, “there is no more male or female …”  like so many other things, have been trashed and forgotten in favor of the values of another “supernatural” teacher, whom we are told is “infallible.”.

Next, the doctrines that are used as foundational supports for infallible authority and autocratic rule must be challenged and modified. Among these, first and foremost is the “divinity” of Christ as “defined” at Nicaea. John and Paul made effusive poetic allusions to Jesus’ cosmic significance as “divine.” The literal interpretation of their poetry, set in stone by Nicaea, has resulted in political power projections by the Church and the various wanna-be empires which identified with it throughout its history. If there was anything clear about Jesus’ message, it was that establishing political ascendancy was absolutely not his agenda. That the Nicaean “dogma” has been used for exactly those anti-gospel purposes is direct evidence of its invalidity.

Furthermore, the Church claims that the one and only “God” of the Universe is its founder, and therefore it is ipso facto the one and only religion for the whole human race. Other traditions may be permitted to exist, but their role is entirely secondary and subordinate. Their significance and “efficacy for salvation” is determined solely by Catholicism, and as expressly articulated by Catholic authorities. These traditional claims of absolute superiority, in their very arrogance and incredibility, stand as a reductio ad absurdum. For the very thought that “God” would actually set up one ethnically limited and culturally conditioned religion to rule over all others on a planet teeming with human diversity, is an insult to the intelligence and benevolence of the “God” evoked in support of these claims. And the added fact that in the past these beliefs served to justify the conquest, plunder and racist enslavement of what we now call the “third world,” confirms the judgment being made here: the “God” cited as their author, could not possibly have “willed” any such thing.

Similarly, the resurrection of Jesus, claimed to be a literal historical fact and used to establish the superiority of Christianity over all other religions and traditions, and proof of Jesus’ “divinity,” must be reinterpreted. Its significance must be understood in religious terms, not political.  And the only way to do that is to insist that it be taken metaphorically, not literally.

For far too long, Christian claims of literal “resurrection” — Jesus’ first and then ours — have been used for the mystification of the masses and the power projections of the Christian state. John Dominic Crossan, a Catholic scripture scholar, teaches that the “resurrection” may be taken either literally or metaphorically so long as the primary focus remains the “message of human justice” (the “kingdom of God“). Should the resurrection ever become a justification for behavioral control, fear before authority, the subordination of other traditions and the projection of political power, we are in the realm of the impossible — this is the argument from a Christian perspective — because the “God” of Jesus could not possibly have willed such things. These are clearly the goals of Caesar.

But we can also argue from the perspective of sincere seekers for truth who are not believers. If the resurrection were literal, then it would appear there is a theist humanoid “God,” after all, and this “God” is a miracle worker. But in our world no similar “miracles” are ever performed, as anyone can see. That means that either there is no “God” at all, or the real “God” is not a humanoid miracle worker. Otherwise “God” would have prevented the Nazi holocaust, and the earthquake in Haiti, and the tsunami in Indonesia … and the Black Plague. The fact that this “God” never does any of these things also proves that “he” did not raise Jesus from the dead. Each implies the other. There would be no possible “Christian” explanation why 6 million Jews and others were exterminated, if it weren’t something “permitted” by the same “God,” refusing to suspend the laws of nature, whose intense love of humankind and detailed attention to our needs supposedly suspended the laws of nature and raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore I conclude, the “God” who did not prevent the holocaust did not raise Jesus from the dead either; and, furthermore, the theist humanoid “God” inferred from such a non-existent literal resurrection also does not exist. There is a reason why these kinds of interventions never occur: It’s not what “God” is like.

In a discussion with N.T.Wright over whether the resurrection should be taken literally or metaphorically, Crossan  asks, “What does literal resurrection add to the message of the advent of the rule of justice”? What Crossan is saying is that, religiously speaking, the significance of the resurrection is that it is the proclamation of the victory of the cross-as-human-justice (the “coming of the kingdom of “God”). The resurrection is an unambiguous declaration of the transcendence of human dignity over the forces that would demean and dehumanize us. But it is a declaration, and like any parable, it uses a story to convery its message.

The world has always been burdened with parasites, thugs — larcenous murderers who use violence to plunder others and arrange things to their own advantage. We are often intimidated by them because they can kill us. Jesus’ death at the hands of the Roman thugs would seem, outwardly, to be exactly such a defeat before these dehumanizing powers unless, equally outwardly, something proclaimed his victory: “he rose from the dead.” To proclaim that death was conquered … a spiritual victory … is made by announcing a concrete symbol of reversal: resurrection. Resurrection’s spiritual significance was symbolic: that nothing, not even death, can conquer the human spirit created by “God” for wholeness and justice. This is the “meaning” of “God” in our lives — human justice and human wholeness — and the only valid meaning of resurrection.

The resurrection then, even if it were literal, must be understood for what it means. Resurrection does not imply nor can it be used for the power projection of one religion over another, or offered as justification for conquest and political domination. If resurrection is used in these inhuman ways, as it has been throughout Christian history, it is grotesquely deformed and stands as a mockery of those that proclaim it. The only way to absolutely preserve the human significance of the resurrection and prevent it from ever being exploited for domination is to insist on its metaphorical character. With metaphor the entire significance is preserved; nothing whatsoever is lost. A literal resurrection, on the other hand, unless its potential for abuse is confronted and explicitly repudiated, offers nothing but trouble and confusion.

The Humanization of Christian Doctine (II)

The Humanization of Christian Doctrine (II)

No other world

 At the heart of belief in the “supernatural” is the conviction that there is another world.  The way that feature has functioned in the West has been to say that we can live forever in that “other world” if we fulfill certain conditions … and those conditions are the program of correct behavior and ritual practice offered by religion. Despite the undeniable fact that the human being, like every other organism on earth, goes through a life cycle that ends in decline and death, the idea that we are not really subject to the common destiny of all living things, has turned out to be an invincible illusion.

Everyone realizes there is no evidence of immortality. Of course the Church’s “revealed” warning that failure to conform to the demands of the other world would result in unremitting torments of the most unimaginable kind, nailed the coffin shut on the question. Even if one had misgivings about it, no rational person in the lands of the Christian West could afford to ignore the possibility. Pascal’s famous “wager” exemplified that attitude. Religion’s success as a social institution, overall, has required little or no external coercion through the millennia for exactly this reason. People voluntarily join the program and fulfill its behavioral and ritual requirements because they think they will live forever and they want to avoid eternal torture. Many feel that without the threat of damnation, belief in immortality by itself would never have enjoyed such universal acceptance because the evidence against it is so overwhelming. If left alone, humankind generally does not stay lost in illusion for long.

But what must be taken into account in any consideration of belief in a supernatural world is the reality of exploitative mystification.

The social-political unit, whether in the form of a great empire or a small village, has always been invested in finding ways to elicit desired behavior from its members. It has been suggested that religion and its emphasis on the supernatural was either originally conjured up or astutely expropriated by political authorities as an instrument of social control. Its importance for society is obvious: if the required behavior can be obtained through the voluntary cooperation of its members, then the use of potentially disruptive external force for procuring labor, military service and the prevention of criminal activity will not be necessary. Looked at from this perspective, religion holds out the real possibility of achieving the most amount of compliance with the least amount of effort. Individuals, seeking to avoid endless punishment, police themselves. They are willing to accept virtually any amount of personal constraint and endure any amount of suffering in order to comply with the entrance requirements of the “other world.”

There are many people in our country, even today after more than 200 years under our “religion-free” constitution, who are convinced that the separation of traditional religion from political power has been fatal to social harmony. They ascribe all our ills to the break-down of theocracy; and they claim its reinstatement will result in a beneficial “moral and spiritual” influence on the authorities as well as on the individual.

So long as people are convinced that there is another world and their destiny there is conditioned on their behavior, the beliefs of supernatural religion pose a threat to political freedom. If humanity is to be spared the mind-control that religious mystification is so efficient at imposing, this core feature of belief in the supernatural — that there is another world whose demands take precedence over the needs of the human community here on earth — must be exorcized for the demonic illusion that it is.

Where does the solution lie? Some see Paul’s definitive derogation of the “law” in Romans as an original attempt to separate the rewards of the afterlife from behavioral compliance. “Salvation,” he insisted, was a free gift. No exploitation was possible in a relationship of unconditioned love. That solution failed, as proven by 2000 years of subsequent Christian history which blatantly functioned on the quid pro quo of behavioral compliance in crass disregard for the injunctions of the Apostle.

The denial of death

How do we explain all of this, and how do we deal with it? The obviously erroneous belief in immortality exercises a mesmerizing effect on our minds. Why? In the 1970′s social philosopher Ernest Becker believed there was an instinctive “denial of death” that drove not only our religious fantasies of immortality, but also explained the energy we pour into accomplishments designed to achieve a certain lasting remembrance in human society. They are all illusions that come from our need to “deny death.” Caesar conquered Gaul to achieve an historical immortality. This is very disturbing. Exactly how much war has been perpetrated by men and women seeking to “immortalize” themselves … and those of their followers who wanted to ride on their coattails? Both phenomena seem to derive from the same root: an aversion to death.

Frankly, I don’t believe this “urge” accounts for as much as Becker claims it does. Of course we have an aversion to death! There is nothing surprising in that. Every living thing we know has an aversion to death. Wherever we find existence we find an insuppressible desire to preserve, safeguard that existence and continue to live. Even the most primitive life forms, single-celled animals and plants, flee from enemies and move toward food sources. In fact, all the activities of any organism, whether it be for food, shelter, self-defense or reproduction, are manifestations of this drive to survive, what Spinoza called the conatus.

Existence, it seems, is an energy that is mindlessly and exclusively focused on itself; that’s what survival means. Existence has only one desire and one goal: to exist. The reason for existence is to exist. Survival is the very nature of all living things.

If Becker is right what we have here is one of reality’s core anomalies. The very forces that drive us to survive seem to feed into an erroneous belief that we can actually beat death, and it’s the “denial of death,” according to Becker, that creates most of our suffering. The concurrence with Buddhism here is intriguing, and I will address this shortly. Becker seemed to feel it was a tragic flaw embedded in the human psyche, an inverted form of the Freudian “death wish,” a kind of radical evil that we cannot avoid.

But I believe there is more to it than that. I am not convinced that belief in immortality and another world is inevitable for human beings … or that without it we descend into moral chaos.  Another factor has come into play, and an otherwise vague desire — to keep on living — took force and focus from a dogmatic certitude that indeed there is a way to beat death and live forever. That certitude in the West came from Christian doctrine which authoritatively declared that there was another world, and it tied reward and especially punishment to our destiny there.

I claim the desire to avoid death, in and of itself, would not necessarily generate anything but fantasies. We fantasize our desires all the time, but we know they are fantasies. Anything else is not normal. People who never recover from their illusions we consider insane. What pushed the desire to live forever over the edge of fantasy and into the belief in immortality was the guarantee of certitude that came from the Christian religion. It is my contention that without that quasi-scientific guarantee, the “afterlife” would have remained a harmless dream — a metaphorical imagery used by bards and poets to describe the depth and intensity of the conatus, the desire for life that came with existence. So what Becker experienced and persuaded himself came from a fundamental urge, was in fact the historic residue of two thousand years of Christian doctrine that had become “hard wired” as a cultural operator in Western society. As it melded into the culture, the belief lost its doctrinal connections and became a “stand-alone” dynamic, a “meme,” a part of the invisible horizon — a “reality” taken for granted and fed by the energy of the conatus.  It was the intrinsic drive for self-pre­ser­va­­tion diabolically deformed into a self-destructive illusion by the reinforcements of Christian belief in the “supernatural.”

We have to realize what this means. If we are to experience the inner peace that comes from self-accep­tance as organic living beings whose life-cycle includes death, we have to liberate ourselves from this supernatural illusion. Our human organisms are impermanent and temporary life-forms like every other thing on earth. Death is an intrinsic part of our destiny. We are marvelous emergent forms of this natural universe … its most “godlike” production to date. We are part of Life and Love itself, and we activate an existential creativity of our own. But like every other living thing on earth, we die.

It is matter’s evolutionary emergence into humanity — this “heaven” that we are — that grounds our sense of the sacred. We do not need another world to recognize the sacredness that radiates from our conatus, the gift of existence. We are immersed in sacred existence as a sponge in the sea. In us matter’s energy has begun to lift the mask of “God.” Our mortality is natural and so is our sense of the sacred.  We are “in heaven” here and now because it is existence itself — Nature (yes, “God”) — in which we live and move and have our being.  What could a “supernatural” world possibly give us that we don’t already have?

Science, Buddhism and the historical Jesus

There are independent authorities that corroborate this view and the illusory nature of belief in the supernatural. The first, of course, and completely neutral, is science. Science doesn’t really “care” one way or another; and that is proven by the fact that even though most scientists do not believe in the afterlife, there are many who do, and continue to be scientists. But science finds no evidence of its existence and generally counsels that if there is no evidence that something exists, it probably doesn’t. Science itself officially functions on the premise that it does not … and it is paradoxical that even those scientists who say they believe in the supernatural are perfectly comfortable excluding it from their work. This suggests the non-literal nature of what they themselves believe.

Buddhism is another. But Buddhism goes much further than science on this question. Buddhism actually repudiates belief in another world and the promise of immortality. For it is one of the central teachings of the Buddha that it is precisely the vain belief in the existence of the permanent self that is the principal source of the efforts at self-aggrandizement that results in the self-inflicted suffering within human society. Buddhism is a practical program. It is the fact that we die and disappear while the particles of which we were constructed go on to become part of other things that provides the objective basis for a realistic evaluation of how to live our temporary lives. We come and we go. While the Buddha never denied the existence of “God” or gods, or another world, he said they were at best irrelevant to the cessation of human suffering, and at worst actually contributed to it by fostering the illusion of personal permanence. A permanent peace of mind, nirvana, was achievable only by embracing the impermanence of the self. We do not last. We die.  … That’s OK. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. It is the ground of our humility and our compassion. Buddhist belief diverges sharply in this regard, not only from Christianity, but also from other contemporary Indian religious traditions:

… In the Vedic [Hindu] tradition one sought the immortality of the soul through the appeasement of gods by prayer and ritual, which have no place in the Buddha’s teaching. In marked contrast to the Jains, who focused on perfecting the individual soul, the Buddha did not accept a permanent individual spiritual substance. (G.C.Pande, “The Message of Gotama Buddha and its Earliest Interpretations,” in Buddhist Spirituality, Crossroad, NY 1997 pp.10-11)

But another supportive authority, surprisingly, is the historical Jesus himself. The message Jesus proclaimed in his lifetime is conspicuously different from the Christian vision and program erected in his name. While he never denied the existence of another world, and even seemed to assume that there was one, for him as much as for the Buddha the “other world” had no functional significance whatsoever. It was irrelevant. His message would not be affected in the least if there were no supernatural world. Jesus, very simply, said that we have a “loving Father” and our behavior and attitudes should imitate “God’s” forgiveness and generosity. It’s really all he had to say. In my terms: the core and source of existence is lavish love; it’s what we are. Trust it, enjoy it and imitate it. Make it available to others. For Jesus, ritual compliance and behavioral perfection were not priorities, and what was really important — loving “God” and loving others — had nothing to do with “another world” — at all!

(… to be continued …)

The Humanization of Christian Doctrine (I)

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”  

This may be taken as the paradigm for religious reform.  Religion, like everything else in our human world, needs to serve the needs of humankind, not the other way around … at least according to Jesus.  This requirement is more significant than it may appear; it should be considered the guiding principle for a massive deconstruction, perhaps bigger than we thought.  For I am suggesting that what is to be demythologized is not just this or that legend, this or that dogma, this or that Church, but the very notion of the supernatural itself.  Religion needs to be humanized; and in order to do that it must be “naturalized.” 

Nature

There is only one reality.  It is Nature.  There is nothing besides or above Nature.  There is nothing supernatural.  Even if we should discover someday that there are multiple universes, each with its own peculiar elements, physical laws and fundamental processes, there is still only one reality and all things are ultimately reducible to some common foundational unity.  There is nothing else.  It doesn’t matter what you call it.  Call it matter, or call it spirit, or call it energy or call it being — it is only one thing.  It is Nature.

There is nothing supernatural.  There is no other world.  The features of our universe are all in seamless continuity with the features of reality everywhere.  The unity is absolute.  It is all there is.  And it contains within itself the explanation for every facet and feature it displays.  Whatever “God” there is, is to be found within Nature.  “God” is Nature’s source and therefore, of all things, the most natural.

There are not two “realities;” there is only one.  Metaphysical dualism — the legacy that dogs us in the West — is impossible.  The differing phenomena of our one reality cannot be groun­ded in two separate sources, residing in two separate worlds, separately derived from two distinct principles, with two distinct ways of being-in-time and resulting in two distinct destinies.  Phenomena that heretofore have been labeled “spirit” and “matter,” or “mind” and “body,” or “natural” and “supernatural,” and considered two separate kinds of reality, are in fact simply properties of the same one reality, misperceived and mislabeled.  It may take many forms, but there only one reality.  

Metaphysical dualism is false and incoherent, and the implications drawn from it are equally false and incoherent.  In our tradition, the dualism of spirit and matter came to be equated in the popular mind with the Chris­tian categories of natural and supernatural, even though orthodox theology would insist that it was incorrect.  Both matter and spirit, the theologians insist, are equally “natural,” and both are equally open to an upgrade they call “supernatural.”  But since what is “supernatural” is defined by them as belonging, strictly speaking, only to “God,” and since “God” is only spirit, it is difficult to see how the two categories would not eventually conflate and encourage the equation of matter with Nature and spirit with the Supernatural.  And that is exactly what happened.  In popular parlance today, the “supernatural” is synonymous with “immaterial” or “spirit” or “otherworldly.”

“Matter” also inevitably became identified with “evil” in this system … and therefore so was Nature.  The inevitability consists in this: The dualist “God” is only spirit.  If that is true, then the question is: whence “matter?”  Matter either derives from something within “God’s” makeup, or it doesn’t.  If “God” is pure spirit with no admixture of matter, there is nothing whatsoever in “God” to explain the existence and character of matter, and matter is something that is entirely alien to “God.”  But that is impossible, otherwise “God” could not have created it, “God” could not even think it and it would not exist.  Fur­ther­more, whatever is alien to “God” is necessarily “evil.”  The incoherence here is total.  Either “God” is somehow material, as Spinoza said, and “matter” is an emanation of “God’s” nature and there­fore a “sacrament,” a “mask” of “God” (as Eriúgena suggested), or matter is irreconcilably evil and exists only to be neutralized, dismantled and eli­mi­nated.  But in the latter case, there still remains the question of matter’s provenance: did “God” create this “evil” or not?  If he did, then “God” is the source of evil.  But if “God” did not create it, then there must be another “God” out there somewhere, the source of evil and matter … and in that case “God” is not “God.”

Religion, the protagonist of the supernatural

Because of the unchallenged dominance of dualism in western culture, religion has become identified with “belief in the supernatural.”  That belief explains the habitual metamorphosis of historical people and events into religious myth, legend and dogma.  It was supernatural “dogmas” like Original Sin and the existence of “God’s” exclusive “Covenant” (contract) with one tribe or one religion that gave rise to racism and a merciless religious intolerance.  Whatever else needs changing because of religion’s doctrinal anomalies, it is first of all “belief in the supernatural” that must be neutralized, dismantled and eliminated.    

The supernatural imagines another world — a realm of existence to which human nature does not naturally belong or from which it has fallen … and long ago forgotten.  It is in the deepest sense of the word, “other” than the human world; it is alien — exactly as alien as matter is to “God” and for the same reasons.  And even while the other world is claimed to be the destiny of humankind, humans have no natural knowledge of its existence nor any clue to what it’s like, no natural information about how to get there and they are dependent upon a supernatural communication from that other world — revelation — in order to live out their destiny.  Simply put, the “other world,” which is supposedly the very reason why we are here, is “beyond nature,” and humankind has no access to it. 

From this I can only draw one conclusion:  belief in the “supernatural” is the quintessence of human alienation.  It is the self-imposed imagined separation of humankind from itself — its source, its organic substrate, its sustaining environment and its ultimate destiny.

Religion in the West claims to be the sole bridge to that other world.  It not only declares that it knows what the other world is like but it also knows and controls what is needed to get there.  As the expression and institutionalization of the “supernatural,” therefore, religion is the repository of the principal justifications for human alienation.  In is active form, religion is alienation’s protagonist and protector.  The roots of all alienation in the West are to be found in “supernatural” religion.

Some may be disturbed by such an analysis.  They see the very sense of the sacred bound up with the belief in the existence of another world.  Aren’t things sacred because of the sacredness of “God”?  And, isn’t “God” an individual, “other” than us?  Wouldn’t this immense person that “God” is, then, constitute a whole “other” world of its own?   Indeed, the core of the problem resides with the idea of a “God” who is “other” than us; it takes “God” out of Nature.  “God,” I insist — with Eriugena, Aquinas, Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, and Spinoza — is not other than us.

“God” is not other

The thought that “God” is “other” is erroneous and it is being driven by an erroneous image.  The naïve image I challenge is that of a fashioner.  The “God” who creates the world the way a builder creates a house or an artist creates a painting produces something outside of and other than himself.  To imagine “creation” proceeding in this way is what locks us into our notion of “God” as “other.”  Fashioners are people who work with already existing materials that are other than themselves, and the results they produce are also outside of and other than themselves.  But for creation there were no materials for a fashioner to work with and the results could not stand on their own without continual sustenance.  It is exactly the existence and character of the very materials and products that make up the universe, where the image fails.  Science has discovered that these materials and their products elaborated themselves and have sustained themselves over eons of time through a process of development that in its organic phase we call evolution.  They are responsible for every form and feature of the current universe.  You would have to imagine a carpenter who not only produced boards and nails out of his head, but also imbued them with a magic energy like the brooms of the sorcerer’s apprentice so that they built the house on their own … and the house would have to sustain itself, as if in thin air.  “Fashioner” is not a very apt metaphor for these discoveries. 

But if we were to start from a different image — a different analogy — we come up with a different way of thinking about “creation.”  If we were to imagine “God” to be like the sun beaming light throughout the solar system, all the objects on earth and everywhere are visible only because they are bathed in the sun’s light.  Let “visibility” be the analog for existence.  All light is really the sun’s light being used, borrowed, reflected by things other than the sun.  Just as visibility is “borrowed” from the sun, existence is borrowed from “God;” it is not ours.  And just the way the sun’s active “shining” is being used by objects on earth to become visible, it is “God” actively “existing” that is being used by us to exist.  This helps us see that existence is not just a passive gift.  It is “God’s” own “existing” in which we participate.   Let’s go further.  Once they are visible, things exercise a creative power of their own, for it is the presence of the sun’s reflected light that stimulated the evolution of eyes in living organisms … and it’s that same reflected light that continues to provide to all sighted organisms a secure way to navigate the earth, find food, shelter and avoid their enemies.

This imagery is helpful because it works with evolution, which the image of the fashioner does not.  For if “God” is the source of the energy of existence, then all things existing are using that energy … they are using “God,” and they create with it by evolving new forms.  Evolution is simply what results from the activation of that existential energy by the particles that possess it in order to continue to survive.  Thus the “materials” themselves, on their own, build and beautify the universe.  They apply and propagate the creative energy of existence even though they are not the source of it.  They themselves are in no way separate from what they are using, for what they are using gives them their very existence.  That helps us understand not only how this cosmos arose as it did on its own, but why things come and go, they do not last, for they do not “own” their own existence.  Like reflected light, our existence is a participation in esse — Existence Itself.

This imagery places the energy that is the “source of our existence” squarely at the core of Nature, the way the sun and its mass is the source and anchor of all light and movement in the solar system.  What we have become accustomed to call “God,” in this conception, far from being “supernatural” is actually Nature itself, shared and sharing its very being.  This Nature, then, insofar as it is creative, and spendthrift of itself, explanatory of itself and its elaborations, has been called by our mystics, natura naturans “nature making nature” … and this same Nature, insofar as it is recipient, poor, needy, empty, full of longing and struggling to survive, is called natura naturata “nature made nature.”  What is most intriguing is that in this view, all things, including ourselves, are a little of each.  Everything that exists gives of itself and creates, and everything that exists is a deep well of need, emptiness and longing. 

But in all cases it is “Nature.” There is nothing beyond it.  Nothing is “supernatural” especially not “God,” its very source and sustainer.  Any religion that claims to be “expert in humanity,” must first recognize the exclusive existence and unmistakable character of the Nature in which human nature “lives and moves and has its being.” 

(… to be continued …)