W E L C O M E . . . F R I E N D S !

 Welcome friends!   

An Unknown God has been re-published by IED press.  Just click on the image of the bookcover in the sidebar and it will take you to a page with more information …

There is a new posting as of 11/14.  It’s titled “THE VIA NEGATIONIS,” another in the latest series on anthropomorphism.  It follows AVOIDING THE “G” WORD.”  It is a development that was inspired by the theme introduced in “CURSE GOD AND DIE!” and the other articles in the  ”neo-atheist” series: the 8/16 article “POINTLESS?” and the earlier  “OPEN LETTER TO A NEO-ATHEIST” (right below it).  As usual, your comments are welcome.

I am opening a new “page.”  It is called “READERS’ FORUM for An Unknown God.  You can access the page by clicking on the title in the right hand column, the last page entry.  Those who would like to join in, or just read what others are saying, are more than welcome.  I look forward to the dialog.

There’s the page called “EMPIRE AND RELIGION“  … I’m hoping it can serve as a forum for discussion of politics.   It’s premised on the  suspicion  that the manipulations of Religion place the Sacred at the service of the perennial project whereby the rich plunder the resources of the earth.  I invite your contributions.

Also, while you’re here, I’d like to invite you to read and comment on the other articles listed in the column to the right, under “pages.”  They are all elaborations or concrete applications of the material in An Unknown God. 

It’s your commentary and contributions that will make this blog more than a personal thing of mine.

Tony

THE “VIA NEGATIONIS”

the via negationis

     Duns Scotus’ attack on the “way of negation” in knowing God,[1] represents what must be recognized as the “majority opinion” that dominated Church practice throughout most of its history.  It highlights the fundamental thrust of Western Christian religiosity (as opposed to Eastern): the West was invested in saying “God” was knowable.  Aquinas taught that we can only say what God is not.  Scotus’ demolition of this via negationis reduces any correc­tions in our statements about “God” to the mere acknowledgement of super-eminence.  It’s either that, Duns says, or else we have to admit we don’t know God at all.  He dismis­ses “the way of negation” as fundamentally an admission of no-knowledge … and then proceeds to reduce “analogy” to either super-emi­nence or no-knowledge.  And by super-eminence he means that it is sufficient to say, for example, that “God is infinitely wise” and the word “infinitely” is enough to cover any scruples one may have about the inadequacy of applying “wise” to “God.”  Of course, the possibility that “no-know­ledge” might be the only right answer was not even considered, despite the mediaeval enthusiasm for the apophatic doctrines of Pseudo-Dionysius.  This was, after all, the Church.  What would happen if it could not speak about “God”? 

     The Western approach, laid out with relentless logic by Duns Scotus, minimizes con­cern for error and supports the claim that our ordinary notions of “God” are sufficiently accurate to put all qualms to rest.  It has had the effect of preserving intact the seriously misleading anthropomorphisms found in “the Book,” especially the Old Testament.  For the argumentation that supported the use of everyday terms like “good” and “wise” and “person” and that “God” has a “will,” issues commandments and is “provident,” encouraged confidence that all the everyday imagery that has been in use since time immemorial, was adequate. It made virtually no demand for correctives, except those that could have been as readily applied to superior humans, as in, for example, “the doctor knows infinitely more than you do … so shut up!“  (… basically the “solution” offered by the Book of Job.)

      The “God” of everyday imagery comes straight from the “Book.”  That “God” has a character, a persona, established by the cultural beliefs held by ancient near-eastern peoples in the first millennium BCE.  “Religion” then was a “national relationship” with a local “god,” a contract (the real meaning of the word “covenant,” or “testament”) binding both parties to clearly stated obligations: the “god” to protect and prosper the nation, and the nation to abandon other gods and glorify their “god” by obeying his commands.  Yahweh was conceived in those terms.  It eventually meant that obedience would occupy center-stage in the elaboration of western morality ― which has always included a poltical bias toward hieratic authority. 

      Western theology has permitted the solidification of the OT imagery portraying “God” as a powerful ruler giving commandments for the purposes of segregative sanctification, and therefore imagined a “God” who was personally insulted by sin because sin is an offense against him and his exclusive relationship with the tribe rather than humanly self-destruc­tive behavior.  “God” for the Hebrew scriptures is moral in a self-centered sense because his very “godhood,” as dependent on the contract, is at stake.  His divinity, in this scheme of things, is not based on the universal relationship established by creation but rather on the particular god-to-nation relationship created by contract.  Yahweh was not “god” for everyone, he was “god” only for the Hebrews because he was their protector, he brought them out of Egypt and made them a people, and received their obeisance and obedience in return.  He could “beat up” the gods of other peoples like the Canaanites … and then demand their extermination for he was not their “god,” he had no contract with them.  He was the “one” and only “god” of the Hebrews.

     After the exile, the imagery about “God” began to universalize, but that incipient process froze about 250 BCE with the decisions establishing the OT canon (primarily the Pentateuch) occasioned by the writing of the Septuagint.  Jesus inherited the ancient nationalist concept embedded in the cononical books, but he was part of the growing current (which included Philo) that was trying to denationalize it, depoliticize it, humanize it (hence Jesus’ “render unto Caesar …,” “God” as “Father” rather than “Yahweh,” and the “Good Samaritan” morality).  It may not have been entirely universalized even for Jesus, but he was clearly moving in that direction (cf his visit to Tyre and the implications of the healing of the “Greek” woman’s daughter with suggestive commentary recorded in Mark 7 and Matthew 15)

     The OT “covenant” (contract) was mediated by a “god-centered” rather than a “human-centered” morality honoring a “God” that guaranteed ethnic identity and national well-being.  The archaic “theology” that believed the world was a battle-ground of national war gods whose ascendency was reflec­ted in the poltical and military success of their associated states, is what necessarily rules the thinking that begins with any literal acceptance of the imagery in the “Book.”  Biblical fundamentalism ineluctably includes the continued dominance of a primitive near-eastern mindset, whose adequacy was already being questioned in the later books of the Hebrew Bible itself.  That mindset ultimately subordinated the message of Jesus, and of course all subsequent “Chris­­­tian” categories, to the archaic thinking characteristic of the founding of the Hebrew “nation” a thousand years before the common era.  The christian “mem­ber­ship” requirement, for example, which was crystalized in the claim that “outside the Church there is no salvation,” is a transparent reprise of the “chosen nation” theme that pervades the OT scriptures.  All references to “God’s chosen people” were henceforth allegorically applied to the “Christian nation” and the old tribal imagery of the “Book” continued to dominate the relationship with “God.”

      In the Mosaic tradition, morality and the obedience it demanded is not primarily derived from what is good for people, but what pleases “God.”  If, in our times, we take the moral code to be “God’s will” metaphorically, we have to realize it is an anachronism: that’s not the way the ancients understood it.  In their mind, it was only at another level down that what’s good or bad for people comes into play, because “God” rewards and punishes behavior.  But please note: reward and punishment is always under the rubric of respect or insult to “God’s” person as a central feature of their nation-god relationship.  In that view, all morality is simply determined by the “will of God” and all compliance as well as punishment for non-com­pli­ance is “for his glory.”  (This may have been the original source of the absurd notion that suffering can glorify “God.”  Thus was the character of “God” assassinated by the “Book.”)  Traditional western Christian theology continued with that priority.  The human significance of morality was secondary.  There was no ultimacy given to “natural law,” for example; it was consulted only as a methodological device for determining the “will of God” in those cases where no “direct word” about the issue could be found in “the Book.”  The “will of God” was always the ruling category.

      The fact is, whatever universalist vision might have been percolating within the “Book” itself, moving away from that nationalistic, king-sheik imagery, was very inchoate and tenuous.  There are clear intimations, but not much more than that ― in the Book of Job, the Prophets and the Wisdom books ― of a new current of thinking based on other premises.  But they were fledgling and always remained subordinated to “Yahweh” the Hebrew warrior “God.”  The message of Jesus and its extension with Paul (following Philo) represented that new current, growing within the Judaic tradition itself, whose vision of “God” transcended primitive nationalism and its associated authoritarianism and military power.  Hence in Athens, Paul could confidently identify “God” as the unknown one whom all the peoples of the earth grope after, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” and in his letter to the Romans definitively declare the Jewish law abrogated.  The law is abrogated because ”God’s” contractual relationship with a limited group mediated by law no longer exists.  He was really proclaiming a newly perceived “God,” one that was no longer a nation-god hawking an obedience-to-law contract.  Not only was the “law” abrogated, but the whole archaic quid-pro-quo character of that kind of chartered relationship was declared obsolete.  It not only freed us from a relationship in obedience to law, it also freed “God” from being tied and limited to any of our local tribal cultures and customs. The “anarchic” implications of such a re-conception were not lost on the political authorities.  The early christians were persecuted with a vengeance that normally tolerant Rome had never before brought to bear on any religion. 

      Rome conquered early christian anti-imperialism, not by persecution, but by seduction.  It made the Church an offer it could not refuse … partnership in the empire.  As history has proven, christianity was quickly swallowed back up into the more primitive categories, drawn in by the authoritarian requirements of the Roman Empire and its later manifestations in the autocratic mediaeval papacy and equally autocratic european national states.  The primitive categories of an authoritarian “personal” God, and a contract-morality based on obedience to law, were eminently suited for the maintenance of authoritarianism in all its forms.  “God” was once again yoked to the “nation” and harnessed to the grinding-wheel of human exploitation.  Thus are authoritarian politics and the archaic anthropomorphic notions of “God” the warp and woof of the same whole cloth.

     A “god-oriented” morality, whose essential dynamic suffuses every page of the “Book,” necessarily implies the centrality of obedience (for without obedience there is no relationship) … and obedience implies compliance with a demand (for without a “law” there can be no obedience).  A “human-centered” morality, on the other hand, is focused on what is good or bad for people; it necessarily implies that “God” leaves the judgment as to what is right and what is wrong to our own sense of responsibility toward ourselves and the earth matrix in which we live.  Morality is a communitarian project of our principal tool of survival ― our intelligence.  Effectively, it says there is no “God’s will” to discern or placate.  And without a “will” there is no “person” as we understand the word.  There are no membership requirements, no demands embedded in “laws” and, of course, no relationship of obedience.  Without that kind of relationship what’s left?  How could a “God” that wants nothing still be called a “person” in the everyday sense of that word. (And, let’s face it, there is no other sense!)  

      And finally, what could a “God” that wants nothing, possibly want with us?

              … except the pleasure of our company!

 Tony Equale 

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[1] from a disputation with Henry of Ghent, c.1305, reproduced in Duns Scotus, Philosophical writings, Bobbs-Merril, NY 1964, tr.Alan Wolter OFM, pp 17-35

AVOIDING THE “G” WORD

AVOIDING THE “G” WORD

             My friend Terry Sissons has a wonderful post on her blog “The Other I” called “My Problem with the ‘G’ word.” The “G” word, of course, is “God” and I also have a problem with it.  I avoid it by using “the Sacred” instead.  I am loathe to call it “God,” not because I am not talking about “God,” but because the word “God” has been so thoroughly corrupted with anthropomorphic imagery that I lose my bearings every time I use it.  I may be wrong, but I suspect the same is true for everyone.  The imagery appears to have a life of its own, and absolutely impervious to thought.  Any attempt to redefine it fails.  Increasingly I believe that those who claim I am trying to trick them, while they appear to not understand, simply have not been able to let let go the imagery about “God” that dominates our imagination.  So any mention of “the Sacred” as a substitute for “God” actually has the opposite effect: it conjures up the very “God” I would expunge from our imagination, as if “let in through the back door.”

             Perhaps “the Sacred” is not the best term, but at least it’s a start.  It gets us away from the “G” word.  It is not yet loaded with the baggage of “providence” and “person,” “almighty” and “all-knowing,” “divine will and command, reward and punishment” ― ancient metaphors that have been taken literally for so long that now it’s impossible to understand them as symbols.  We are so utterly mesmerized by our traditional images that we can’t even understand what anthropomorphism means and why its prohibition must be taken seriously.  The warning that instructs us to say that God is not a person rather than to say “he” is, is simply unintelligible to most people.  It is ignored and dismissed as theological mumbo-jumbo and we continue blithely to relate to a dangerous puerile product of our collective imagination. 

             So, here we are at the beginning of the third millennium of this “sacred” era, the bewildered inheritors of a tradition so rich and trans­historical, so broad and multi-ethnic, so sacralized by the blood of those who died or were slaughtered in its name, that we may be forgiven if we are overwhelmed by it.  The inertial weight of this massive behemoth is so great that many feel there are only two options … either live with the damn thing the way it is, or walk away from it entirely, once and for all.  This is the Church.  We are all quite familiar with this feeling.

             We must realize, of course, the infantile fundamentalist “God” that follows us like a dark shadow is artificially kept alive in the crypts of the Church. That “God’s” Church offers a refuge for the immature in a world that would be adult.  That “God” is a false god, and as with all idols, those that fall down before it become like it.  The Church is the way it is because its “God”-idol is the way it is, and the Church must keep things that way or it will disappear … or change radically, which is the same thing.  You can’t change the one without the other.  And the “two option” hypothesis suggests that to dump that “God” you’ll have to dump that Church.  This is not a plan, it’s an observation. 

             Were that Church ever to condescend to dialog on the issue, it would probably try to defend itself by saying that despite the utter madness on the surface, it has proposed to do one and only one thing through the millennia of its conflicted existence:  to nurture the human relationship to “God.”

             Many dispute that claim.  They say that through the ages there was just too much concubinage with empire to deny the charge that the only thing the “God”-idol ever meant to the Church was its usefulness as a tool for the maintenance of the status quo of structured predation.  And when I look at the “God” they are talking about, I realize they are absolutely right.  That “God,” like Tolkien’s ring of power, was forged in the furnaces of hell for no other purpose and with no other possible effect than to enlist the multitude in their own exploitation.  That “God” does not exist, I say, or if he does he must be exorcized ― for he is not “God;” he has set himself up in his place ― a philistine Goliath champion of philistines.  They are of the same cloth, that “God” and that Church.  Those that worship idols, keen the psalms, become like them. 

             But if the “two option” hypothesis is wrong … if there is a “third way” between Scylla and Charybdis … if the boy is to fell the Giant, if the Temple is to be brought down by a blind man, and the incense to Caesar exchanged for the blood of resistance … it will have to be in the name of that which has no name, not made by human hands, which refuses to be called “God” and is visible only as the face of our hungry human hearts.  This nameless presence lurks in no dark crypt, is enthroned in no high temple, promises no miracles, offers no life without death, demands no cloying incense, issues no commands, metes out no eternal punishments.   It asks nothing, does nothing, wants nothing … except to be with us. … It’s too simple for words … .

 Tony 

CURSE GOD AND DIE!

… CURSE GOD AND DIE!  … Job, 2:9

              The title of this reflection is intended less dramatically than it might appear.  I’m still trying to understand this thing I have called “neo-atheism.”  I realize that I have experienced something of it myself, and I want to explore this important and revealing phenomenon.   As with Job’s wife, “theism” can take all sorts of forms; and not all are positive.

             In my last communication on this question, I tried to deal with the “pointless” remark of the physicist Steven Weinberg.  But Weinberg has written more on the subject than that famous aphorism.  The more of him that I read the more I saw my own personal experience reflected in his attitude.  For me Weinberg is a key to an understanding of this issue.  I want to pursue that connection in this letter.  What follows will apply mainly to me.  Others can decide whether it applies to them …

            In my first letter I used the term neo-atheist.  But I sensed from the start that “atheist” was not exactly the right word and “neo-” was an initial attempt to nuance it.   As I said there, I have a lot of respect for atheists … and with reference to the absurd supernatural theist “God” of our tradition, I consider myself one.  If my own experience is anything of a reliable guide, the phenomenon reveals a paradoxical alternative.  Let me explain.

the atheist

             The atheist is not an angry man.  In my opinion, the true atheist has determined there is no personal source of the suffering and death that besieges human existence.  That awareness doesn’t assuage the primary suffering whatever it might be, but at least it eliminates the secondary anguish, endemic to the religions of the Book, created by the maddening thought that “evil” has been intentionally planned or consciously permitted by a rational “God-person.”  This same putative “God” was, furthermore, alleged to have the gall to claim that the suffering we undergo is good for us, or worse, that it is good for him (“his glory”) … and though he could, he will do absolutely nothing about it.  Such a thought made me mad as hell.  Apparently, it also perplexed someone else about 600 BCE … hence the Book of Job.

             Weinberg himself gives evidence of an intense passion in this regard.  For he doesn’t say his “atheism” results from the simple fact that “God” does not exist (something he always seems to avoid saying), but that the “God” of his people did nothing to stop the holocaust!  Starting from there, the randomness he sees as a physicist persuades him there is no “God” who designed the universe.  So I’m suggesting his “atheism,” in the first instance, is a reaction to a betrayal, and that establishes an affect, an “attitude” that doesn’t go away.  I feel confirmed in that interpretation when I see that he makes use of his “atheism,” not as a simple fact, but rather as an insult.  As if saying “you do not exist!” were the ultimate slap-in-the-face to a “God” who claims His very name is “I am Who am.”  

  … Am I projecting this onto Weinberg?  Let’s listen to the man himself:

 Religious people have grappled for millennia with the theodicy, the problem posed by the existence of suffering in a world that is supposed to be ruled by a good God. They have found ingenious solutions in terms of various supposed divine plans. I will not try to argue with these solutions, much less to add one of my own. Remembrance of the Holocaust leaves me unsympathetic to attempts to justify the ways of God to man. If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers

– Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory

             There is more than a modicum of sarcasm in this quote from Weinberg.  It doesn’t sound like a simple declaration of “no, honey, there is no Santa Claus.”  What I hear is open derision of “God” for his impotence or his unconcern … or both.

             The next passage is from an article of Weinberg’s based on a talk he gave in 1999 at a science Conference in D.C. A link to the article follows.  Here I’ll just include this paragraph:

    I don’t need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. But in fact the perception that God cannot be benevolent is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides make a quite explicit statement that the gods are selfish and cruel, though they expect better behavior from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us to bash the heads of infidels and demands of us that we be willing to sacrifice our children’s lives at His orders, and the God of traditional Christianity and Islam damns us for eternity if we do not worship him in the right manner. Is this a nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not supposed to judge God according to human standards, but you see the problem here: If we are not yet convinced of His existence, and are looking for signs of His benevolence, then what other standards can we use?

 – Steven Weinberg, “A Designer Universe?” A Designer Universe (1).doc

 “Not yet convinced”?  That phrase is the only reference to atheism in the entire paragraph and it doesn’t quite come across as a resounding declaration that there is simply no “God.”  The whole piece is full of smoldering anger embedded in accusatory and disdainful innuendo.

             It seems to me that once you decide there is no “God,” there’s no sense being angry, … there’s no one there to get angry at!  Well, a lot of persecution has been perpetrated in the name of that “God,” and a lot of false expectation generated, so it’s understandable that there might be some residual anger.  But how can Weinberg direct his anger at a “God” that does not exist?  The inconsistency here becomes clearer for us if we imagined such anger directed at “Thor” or “Jupiter” ― “gods” that we all agree really don’t exist ― we’d call it nuts!  The difference in our reaction corresponds to a difference in the “amount” of non-existence allowed to be there.  What does that tell us about Weinberg … and about us?

             Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not denying Weinberg’s claim to be an atheist, I’m just trying to understand the form it has taken for him … and for those of us who shared his feelings.  But I believe it is not peculiar to us as individuals.  It is a generalized phenomenon, I believe endemic in our culture.  It confirms my allegations about the dysfunctional “theological” inheritance of the “religions of the Book.”  An absurd and un-real “God,” in this complicated danse macabre, is alive and well in some strange way and continues to perpetrate deception and injustice.

the Jews

            What ends are served by such a subliminal mechanism?  Well, for one thing, it means Weinberg does not have to attack Judaism and the perennial Jewish resistance to aban­­doning their traditions.  Jews cling to “Yahweh” with a tenacity that defines them; their fidelity is the ground of their ethnic identity.  So Weinberg is in a bind.  He cannot berate his people for being naïve and uncritical.  Were they to follow his recommendations, they would immediate­ly stop being Jewish … or they would have to accept that being Jewish was only a biological inheritance ― having “Jewish blood” ― a capitulation to the worst of their racist detractors.  As the sharp features of old ethnic Jewry fade into the melting pot of modern nations, such an identity becomes meaningless.

             However, as a matter of historical fact, the original “blame” for the “God illusion” falls squarely on the Hebrew Scriptures.  It was the Jews that provided the narrative and the anthropomorphic Biblical imagery that underlay Christianity and Islam along with their traditional intolerance.  The “heads to be bashed” that he alludes to were the Canaanites whom the Hebrews were supposed to exterminate. 

             Jews, for Weinberg, are by definition victims.  They cannot be considered perpetrators.  Duped, maybe, but not the promoters of the illusionary “God” ― the “God” that ordered a holocaust of “heathen” in ancient Israel, justifies the genocide of Palestinians today and permitted the Nazi holocaust 70 years ago … events that are all related ― derived from the original commands in Deuteronomy (2:34; 3:6; 20:16-18). That’s the “God” that Weinberg claims must be exorcized by science.

             The “God” of the Hebrew Scriptures atrophied about 200 BCE, and was taken up whole cloth by Christianity and later, Islam.  Weinberg attacks that ancient naïve and simplistic imagery, long ago transcended by men of such scientific eminence as Albert Einstein.  This following is from paragraph #2 of “A Designer Universe”:

 You may tell me that you are thinking of something much more abstract, some cosmic spirit of order and harmony, as Einstein did. You are certainly free to think that way, but then I don’t know why you use words like ‘designer’ or ‘God,’ except perhaps as a form of protective coloration.

             That’s the first and last we hear of any alternative “God.”  A statement like this tells me that Weinberg is aware there are other ideas out there that exclude the notion of “design” (and “providence”); but he chooses to ignore them and confine himself to one that is intellectually shallow.  ( By the way, please note: by not engaging Einstein on this issue, Weinberg is conspicuously passing up an opportunity to say, if he ever wanted to, that the very “sense of the Sacred,” no matter what form it takes, is the carrier of this atavistic “disease.”  There is no reference to a “slippery slope” that leads inevitably to the horrors of Auschwitz. )

             For my part, I propose that the ancient traditional notions of “God” are anthropocentric and anthropomorphic, naïve and simplistic, absurd and impossible.  Those notions must change.  Weinberg paradoxically maintains the very imagery that rationality (science) exposes as impossible, and by that, I submit, insures that the absurd “God” will never go away.  For by insisting that “God” simply disappear instead of maturing, he foolishly chooses to disregard an ineradicable sense of the Sacred that resides in the human heart, which is the source of the myths of “God” and not the other way around.  My guess is that by doing this he maintains both his Jewishness rooted in the ancient “God of the Book” and the exquisite intensity of his anger, justified as a defense of scientific truth.  

anger

             I can only guess about Weinberg’s subconscious motivations, but I can speak with authority about my own.  Chapter III of An Unknown God begins with a sketch of what produced a similar anger in me.  I believed that the traditional “God” of naïve providence, being all powerful and all knowing, had to be unimaginably cruel.  We may remember that Augustine, overwhelmed by the scope and intensity of human suffering, concluded that “God” must be enraged and implac­ably hostile to humankind to allow such things to happen.  It was the basis of his theory of Original Sin.  But even if you don’t believe that “God” is capable of either rage or hostility, you still have to ask yourself: how could “God” ever permit the senseless horrors that people are forced to endure?

            If you answer, as I do, that there is no way any provident “God” could possibly permit much less intend these things, you are left with only two alternatives: either there is no “God,” period … or you are forced to rethink your concept of “God” so radically ― specifically to say that “God” is neither provident nor a designer (in any conventional sense of those words) ― that the very word “God” itself, as it has come down to us, can no longer be used.  I absolutely agree with Weinberg that in this case to use the words “designer” or “God” is meaningless.  So, at the end of the day there is only one outcome for all of us: there is no such “God” … the traditional “God” does not exist.  In that sense, I too am an atheist.

             But why the anger?  Once again, I project from my own experience.  Anger is not necessarily an undesireable passion.  Rage at injustice is widely recognized as providing a welcome clarity of focus in a world otherwise riddled with complexity, uncertainty, doubt and confusion.  From hollywood blockbusters to the justifications of military intervention, we have all been manipulated to a sense of sacred purpose conjured up by acts that “cry out to heaven for vengeance.”  Anyone who has enjoyed the uninhibited energy that comes with righteous anger, as I have, is aware of its addictive potential.  This kind of anger produces a “permission-to-punish” and an emotional distance from the target-object that allows for a forcefulness that can appear to be courage or clarity of thought. In any case it permits some­one immobilized by doubt to act, and to act with power.  It gives you a kind of prophetic fury.

             My anger at first was directed at “God” for not protecting the victims of human oppression … and for not “moving” Christians in the right direction.  But I avoided criticizing Catholicism and Christianity for many years … and ironically that went so far as to prevent me from re-thinking my basic beliefs about “God.”  But why was I so protective of my “Church?”

             “Catholicism” is distinguished from other “religions” by what is considered its traditional vision and pratice.  For these purposes Catholics are not permitted to develop a new imagery about “God” because the recognizable features that serve for “Catholic” identification would be lost.  The Catholic “doctrine of God” from this perspective has little to do with what makes sense, given what we know about science, history, politics and people, but is embraced rather for its role in providing shibboleths ― ritual pass­words that authenticate membership in an ancient “club.”  Beliefs stop being the vehicles of a realistic relationship with “God” and the world and become instead a mark of identity, an instrument of social cohesion, a ghetto glue that keeps the community together (and provides an essential individual and ethnic identity).  In my case loyalty to “my people” was something of a sacred trust … and in order to keep me from attacking the foundations of social cohesion and my own self-identity, it pre-emptively kept me from thinking.  It was all quite unconscious.  I did not permit myself even to imagine alternatives to a dysfunctional theology, much less move in any practical direction that would make me unrecognizable as Catholic.

            I was feeding off the continued existence of an intellectually dysfunctional “God” in order to sustain my identity and my “attitude.”  I’m saying that I simultaneously asserted both membership and dissent by clinging to an absurd “God” who would not go away.  But this “God” could not be permitted to go away; his presence and traditional character were required or the connections disappeared.  It’s a “Texas two-step” from which the dissenter draws both identity and independence.  All this militates against the re-think­ing of “God,” which, to my mind, should be a normal, rational exercise incorporating the new information provided by physics, evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, political history, etc.  But the continuation of the cherished identity and equally cherished anger stemming from a sense of betrayal demanded the continued presence of the tradition­al absurd “God.”  This is a very strange “atheism,” … but, in my experience, a common phenomenon for the “religions of the Book.”  Our ideas of “God,” after all, come from the same ancient source.  The Book of Job never answered the question it set out to resolve.  I know now that it couldn’t … the absurd “God” it took for granted is internally contradictory.  It is impotent to do anything but perpetuate the contradictions.

            The “God” of the Book: an ancient religious theory with no more claim to accuracy than the equally ancient hypotheses of science and cosmology from which it was derived.  But how differently we treat these ideas!  Science was allowed to mature and displace its forebears, but the corresponding “theology” was not.

             Hence like me, people of the Book don’t begin by confronting the patent absurdities of traditional theodicy.  They treat the ancient, pre-scientific “God” of the Book as if it were “God” himself.  And so they continue to identify with their traditions and their people and shortly find themselves locked in a room with no exit.  We have something in common with the wife of Job, who, unlike us, had no doubt whatsoever of the existence of that “God.”  She was convinced that he, like every other powerful “person” she ever knew, was capable of cruel and vindictive behavior.  Once this “God-person” had you in His sights, you were finished.  There was no appeal, no redress, no one to turn to.  She was sick and tired of Job’s pathetic excuses for “God’s” behavior and his expectations for relief.  Once things got this bad, the verdict was in: he hates you; he’s going to torture you endlessly.  She did not mince words:  stop whining, “curse God, and die!“  It was an angry reaction.  She was a human being, and could not bear seeing Job grovel before such a “God.”  She may have hated “God” … but she was definitely not an “atheist.”

            I am persuaded that like Mrs.Job, misotheists cannot conceive of the source and ground of the Universe in any other terms than the traditional designer-creator and autocratic ruler: authoritarian, punitive, micro-managing, whimsical, utterly self-involved, uncaring ― an individual “person” who, despite all claims to the contrary, abandons the poor, blesses the rich and powerful, is easily insulted, and “needs” to have his dignity acknowledged and his com­mands obeyed.  Being human, and far superior to this “God” ― a gross imitation of a self-indulgent Near-Eas­t­ern Sheik or ego-obsessed Roman Emperor ― they are angry women and men.  Like Mrs.Job, they rightly reject such a “God” and those who give him refuge.

  Tony Equale, October 2009

“POINTLESS”?

             Steven Weinberg is a famous physicist, and a Nobel laureate.  He made a statement back in the late ’70’s that, because of its apparent extreme nihilism, has been quoted endlessly.  Those who cite it, however, usually do so disapprovingly.  Most often they are using it for stark contrast.  Bio-chemist and biologist Ursula Goodenough,  in her book The Sacred Depths of Nature, quotes Weinberg as saying:

 “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

             Of course there are others, (yes, Larry, my neo-atheist friend, you are among them) who quote Wein­berg as the ultimate exoneration for their own intellectual flaccidity ― their refusal to make any effort to try to understand the universe that spawned them and whose existence, energy and genetic markings they bear in their very flesh.  They use Weinberg’s statement to justify having an “attitude” … and not a position.  But please note, Weinberg’s statement is not the result of his investigations as a physicist.  Calling the universe “pointless” is gratuitous on his part, and beyond the valid interests of his discipline.  He won the Nobel prize for something entirely unrelated to his “pointless” remark … and certainly not for his non-existent contribution to philosophy.

 [It bears mentioning that Weinberg is a very outspoken enemy of religion.  He is the son of immigrant Jewish parents and has explicitly declared that a major source of his antipathy toward religion is his rejection of the "God" who apparently was powerless to stop the holocaust.  From my point of view, his is also an "attitude" ... and quite understandable.   It reinforces my contention about the absurdity and predictable effect of the current western imagery of the supernatural theist "God" of Providence.  See An Unknown God, chapter III.]

             “Pointless”? … quite a word.  What exactly does it mean?  Let’s check it out.  We say, “he made his point.”  In these cases to have a “point,” seems to mean saying something specific, or plausible.     … But then we also use the word in a slightly different sense when we say, “What’s the point” or “there’s no point to it.”  In this sense, “point” seems to mean “reason,” as in “there’s no reason to do it,” meaning “it has no purpose.”  This seems closer to what Weinberg perhaps meant, although we can’t be sure because he limits himself to pithy aphorisms.  He has not expostulated on the matter.  … And neither have you, Larry.

             So if I’m right, then, Weinberg seems to be saying the universe has no point … no reason to be here … no purpose.

             OK. Let’s run with this football.  Let’s say I agree, (which, as a matter of fact, I do, as will become clear as we go along).  I would agree the universe has no reason to be here.  What does that mean?  Well, by “no reason,” I mean it has no purpose for being here beyond itself.  It is here just to be here.  There is no why in the sense of going somewhere or becoming or producing something else …  something outside of, or other than this universe and the way it is.  The only thing that is here is this universe, and apparently the only thing that will ever be here is this universe, and as far as we can tell some of its features may change, and it may even die someday, but it is not on its way to becoming something else.  There is no other world. 

             Let’s clarify.  To ask “why” or “what’s the point,” brings to mind some kind of rational entity that does things for “reasons” that would have to be responsible for the presence of purpose in the universe … and therefore the lack of rational purpose indicates the absence of such an entity.  There is no one that “wants” the universe to do something of whom we can ask, “What’s the point.”  ”Pointless” means there is no recognizable purpose, goal or end beyond what we see laid out before us, and by implication no one there to do it.  So, yes, in that sense, I agree with Weinberg, it’s all “pointless” because there is no rational entity giving it purpose, and it seems to have no purpose other than just to be there.  

who wants what?

             There is no outside source of “purpose” for the universe as we have conceded, but is there some manifestation of “intentionality” inside the universe that we can identify and perhaps question? 

            We live in a world teeming with life, human, animal, plant, insect, microbe, mold, virus.  There is virtually no cubic inch on the surface of the planet where some form of life does not exist.  And all of these life forms “want” something so desperately that we are able to define them as “alive” precisely because what they want is on such shameless, undisguised display.  They all want to be here … desperately.  Yes, this “want” is also pointless in the very strict sense that none of these life forms, including ourselves, want anything more or other than what they actually have here and now.  We all want to be here … we all want to be exactly what we are … to have exactly what we have … we want nothing fundamental to change.  We want to survive.  The only changes we might admit we want would be to eliminate the obstacles to our continued survival as we are, what we need to have to remain what we are.  None of us, whether bacterium or human being, wants anything other than to continue to be what we are … !

             Even humans, who are capable of imagining another world where they claim they will go when they die, are unable to conceive of that world except in terms of the life and existence they have here and now.  What they want in this supposed other world is to return to be what they were here … their individual selves … and maybe recover what they lost, like relationships with their parents, partners, children, friends … or themselves when they were young.  … they would rather that being there (the promised “other” world) is really an extension of being here.  They accept the “other world” as a reluctant alternative … they accept it because given the fact of death, it’s all they have left.  But it’s not really what they want.

             Now, we appear to be the only life form that can even imagine the possibility of another world.  Everything we can see on this teeming earth, the animals, plants, insects, etc., have no inkling that there might be anything else, much less are they capable of wanting any such thing.  They only want what they are.  And WE UNDERSTAND THEM PERFECTLY because we want the same thing. 

            Well, all these life forms, including us, are constructed out of untold numbers of living cells that are themselves the conglomerates of aggregations of complex molecules, and those molecules congealed out of the collections of atoms built up from the simplest one proton hydrogen.  The particle physics that, in our era, has revealed the substructure of the atom, opens us to a nano world, too small to see or test, where the foundational stuff of atoms  is thought to be vibrating loops of energy responsible for everything that exists in the universe, whether inert or living, infinitely large or infinitesimally small ― everything.  The manifestations of life with its fierce desire to be-here that we are familiar with on earth have obviously drawn their energy from the energy substrate of the universe of which they are made.  As life complexifies and intensifies through the levels of evolutionary development, one thing seems to remain constant … the raw, implacable, insuppressible desire to be-here.  Unless someone would unscientifically attempt to insert an arbitrary wall of division between living things and the substrate out of which they are constructed, we have to say that life reveals it is the universe itself that wants to be here.

            So what’s the point?  Well it seems that the so-called pointlessness is really not a problem for most of us … I’m including all the species of living things I’m aware of …  None of us finds it a problem that we are not becoming something else, or going anywhere else besides here.  All we really want is to be here … and so, that the universe is “pointless,” meaning it’s not becoming something else (and I’m able to stay being myself), is just fine with us.  But, of course, we are not happy when we are not able to just stay ourselves … by that I mean when we can’t survive, or when we become sick, or grow old and disabled or die.     

             Life ends at death.  To end and to be an end are two different things.  If what we meant by “end” was “purpose,” i.e., that the very purpose of life is to die, it contradicts our categories.  For if life had a purpose of any kind, it could not be called pointless.  If the purpose of life was to die it wouldn’t be pointless, but it would be absurd.  I don’t think most people, except crazy religious fanatics, would ever claim the very point of life was to die.  Otherwise no one would ever eat, go to the doctor, defend themselves from attack, feed and protect children.  It’s an obvious inversion.  Even those that say they believe such pathological inanities submit to their imagined program as to a distasteful inevitability and with the secret hope that something like what we know and love here awaits them later.  If it were up to them, it’s not what they would have chosen.  So we see that being “pointless,” just being-here, is not so bad.  It is, after all, what we really want.  It’s not that life is “pointless” that bothers us, it’s that this wonderful “pointless” thing ends.  It might be pointless, but it is far from absurd.

 a different kind of pointless?

             So, we’ve eliminated most senses of “pointless.”  What’s left?  Does the fact that life “ends” make it pointless and absurd?  Is this what Weinbrerg and you mean, Larry?  Let’s make this more concrete.  Let’s imagine:  I go on vacation to the beach with the partner I love … I rent a wonderful beach house, the weather is spectacular, there are movies, shows and restaurants in the nearby town, I lie in the sun, swim, sleep, read.  I’m there for two weeks.  Then it ends.  Wow!  was that ever great!.  But it ended … did that make it pointless?  What was the point of a vacation?   Does everything have to have a point?  No.  The vacation was great because it was great … no further point.  End of story.  Why can’t life be taken that way?  It has no other point, but it doesn’t need one.

            Do all temporary things become pointless and absurd just because they are temporary?  Is that what you find so pointed about Weinberg’s pointless remark?  Have you sworn off vacations, Larry, because you know they have to end?  Do you refuse to bring children into the world because it’s all absurd and pointless?  Why then, do you go on vacation, go to the doctor when you’re sick, bring children into this world, build and protect a family, all of whom are going to die, and some in great anguish … Larry, why do you take a partner knowing that one of you MUST die first leaving the other impaled and lost.  Don’t bother trying to dodge the questions, Larry, let me answer for you:  BECAUSE IT IS NOT POINTLESS.  What’s the point?  The point is being-here and being-here together … even for a while … is good … it’s very, very good.  It’s so good that it’s almost too good to be true.

                        THAT’S THE POINT!

 Tony  

 PS  Or maybe you and Weinberg both come out of a tradition of religious fanaticism where you thought you were literally promised a “God” who intervened in history, protected the widows and orphans, brought low the oppressors, healed the sick and raised the dead, and provided a paradise of unimaginable delights where the lion laid down with the lamb … and then you found out it was all poetic metaphor for what would happen to this world if we lived with humility, gratitude, justice, love and service.  Is that it, Larry?  Did you, of all people, miss the poetry, the literary turn, the trope, the symbol, the allusion, the metaphor?  You don’t have to answer!  …  T.

           

OPEN LETTER TO A NEO-ATHEIST

OPEN LETTER TO A NEO-ATHEIST,       (7/28/2009)

from Tony Equale

Dear Larry,

             I’ve decided to call you a neo-atheist.   Let me tell you why.  I was inspired by the the label “neo-conser­vative” applied over the last 30 years to intellectuals in full-tilt recoil from the revolutionary initiatives of the flaming sixties to which they had originally subscribed.  And just like “neo-con,” which has the pejorative connotation of a knee-jerk rejection-reaction, “neo-athe­ism” alludes to a leap of faith and feeling that, precisely because it is born of rejection has cystified itself against thought.  Neo-atheism, in other words, is irrational.

             The normal atheist is rational, the neo-atheist is NOT.  And that irrationality is the clue that you are in a full blown backlash from an earlier irrationality, and one that you cannot or will not integrate it into your present trajectory.  If the original commitment had been mature, you might have modified it, even rejected it, but you would not be, at this point, irrational.  How is your irrationality manifest?  We’ll get to that shortly.

the vulnerable adolescent

             To explain my take on the personal dynamic functioning here, Larry, permit me to present a parallel example.  Here’s one we are all familiar with.  The adolescent male of the species is notoriously vulnerable to the promotions of the military which symbolically offer his budding manhood the reassurances his insecurity demands.  Hence the transhistorical phenomenon of war may be plausibly explained by its aptness as a “rite of passage” for each new generation of tumescent teen­agers, who like the children of Hamlin, follow the piper to their eternally predictable doom.  Every generation knows it.  Every generation fails to avoid it.  There is a normal personal inadequacy ― adolescence ―  often accompanied by an enforced childhood “docility,” that carries a natural sense of impotence. That impotence is promised a resolution in the obedient violence of “manly” war.  

            But notice how “docile obedience” is functional on both sides of the divide.  An imposed (not personally chosen) childhood docility creates the impotence that is promised to be transcended by violence … but since the violence is itself not personally chosen, but performed as a surrogate and in obsequious fear of violent authority, the impotence is regenerated in the very act of its supposed transcendence.  Violence used as an antidote to impotence produces more impotence.  Like an addiction, it often leads to subsequent violence, personal or familial.  Like alcohol, the “solution” produces the need for more “solution” … precisely because it is being used to do something it cannot do.    

            The parallelism with “true believers” like us is more than superficial.  Adolescence is the context in each case.  For the “true believer,” an obedient docility enforced by an implacable hieratic authority rendering all autonomy criminal, generates an impotence that becomes socially fertile (even applauded) by its sublimation in an act of total commitment and self-donation .  But this apparent “achievement,” like the violence of war, is unsatisfying, for the commitment is to an eternal docility, sterile obedience and abdication of autonomy.  If the “solution” is addictively re-applied, as the formation instructs, it turns into an endless surrender to an all consuming cause ― the same or others. 

             The neo-atheist, having once been thus “duped” in his adolescence, needs to declare his ability to resist any such humiliation in the future.  He assumes a posture of total intransigence toward all manifestations of the earlier ideology, but does so with an ironic twist.  He applies the same unquestioning docility and self-surrender to the new “ideology” as he had to his erstwhile beliefs.

            When the ideology is rejected but the addictive self-abdicating dynamic is not, you get the irrationality of which I speak.  The “true-believer” changes the content of his ideology, but retains his character as “true-believer.”  Hence the “neo” sydrome, true of the neo-con as of the neo-atheist.  You can’t talk to them because, like all true believers, they are lost in the throes of a salvific self-surrender.

             The neo-atheist’s rejection is expressed in global and categorical terms.  He finds himself with absolutely nothing to say, because all distinctions have been blurred, melted together in the heat of the passion for rejection.  Nothing is specified except for one supreme and exclusively relevant item: religious duping.   And anything even remotely reminiscent of it is immediately perceived as a threat to its re-establishment.

 the irrationality

             This has reached such proportions, that the ordinary human phenomenon that we call “sacred” is summarily dismissed as absurd, and deceiving.  The fact that this phenomenon has no necessary connection with “religion” does not deter the neo, as he accuses the use of the very word and concept of being some kind of “sleight-of-hand,” a neo-duping of the apparently still-vulnerable adolescent.  Is this rational?  … are we to say that the duty to protect our children is NOT a sacred responsibility? … that the obligation to be faithful and supportive to one’s life-partner is not a sacred promise? … that our compliance with law, justice, the honoring of contracts, keeping our pledged word are not sacred responsibilities we take on?  This insistence on the inadmissability of the word and category “sacred” is irrational.

            The sense of the sacred is a psychic and social fact, how you explain it is an interpretation.  Anyone can validly deny that he/she has any sense of the sacred.  Implausible as it may be, who is to gainsay someone’s testimony about their own psychic state?  But to extrapolate from that and claim that a sense of the sacred is not a pervasive, almost universal, human phenomenon, is entirely invalid, and intellectually dishonest.  (And if the original claim is an intentional dissimulation, it’s a lie, besides).  Such a denial of fact suggests that the loss of rational control is already at a pathological level.  For a normal, rational “atheist,” proposing a non-religious or non-theist explanation for the sense of the sacred would be sufficient and necessary to ground his/her position.  The neo-atheist cannot do that.  He must dismiss it out of hand.

             What’s opposed to all this irrationality?  Thought, reason, intelligent analysis, researched discussion.  The solution to the impotence / surrender syndrome ― like the solution to the impotence / violence, or the impotence / alcohol syndrome ― is the direct, not surrogate, transcendence over impotence and abdication of autonomy by personal confrontation and appropriation.  It means no longer running away in fear from the words and categories of the former entrapment.  It means no more surrogates.  It means the direct assertion of personal control over all the significant aspects of one’s life, including those aspects over which one had no control at one point in time.

             “Running away” is a clear sign that the neo has no control over the categories of his original enslavement.  The paradox here is tragic.  For what it really indicates is that the neo is still helpless before them.  The neo is in fact still so dominated by the earlier ideology that he cannot allow himself even to look at it for fear of once again capitulating to its siren power.  He has never thought it through.  This is made abundantly clear in the fact that the “neo” presents no rational arguments for his “atheism” except to declare unthinking loyalty to its icons.  For him, the fact that Hitchens or Dawkins, or Harris or Dennet or Weinberg have a “position” is sufficient.  As with his former religious commitment, he doesn’t have to “know” or understand … it’s sufficient that the authorities “know.”  He simply goes along in obedient docility.  As with his earlier religious commitments, he has never thought through his atheism either.  He doesn’t even know what these people are actually saying and why.

speaking honestly

            What has been implicit in my remarks and I want to emphasize is that I am not challenging the atheist’s right to, or even the undeniable rationality of, his atheism.  I more than respect the atheist.  I personally feel the atheist, because he rejects the supernatural theist “God” of recent tradition, is in many ways closer to reality than most “believers.”  Like the atheist, I also reject that particular idea of “God.”  I believe it is absurd and I offer arguments and alternatives in An Unknown God.

             I am not arguing against the “neo’s” atheism, I am attacking his “neo-ism,” i.e., the fact that he has erected his rejection into another unthinking abdication of reason, thought, feeling and understanding.  I attack it in the name not of a “God,” whose features are no longer credible, but of our humanity which does not need more de fide “dogmas” or true believers who refuse to think and talk … we need more dialog, thought, reason ― those essential elements of fertile and pacific interchange among people of all persuasions that make human society life-sus­taining and not a series of endless wars and senseless slaughter. 

             Larry, I suspect very strongly that your inability to confront and control these issues means that subconsciously they are still in the driver’s seat for you … potentially ready to re-engage your commitment ― irrationally of course ― when you’re not watching.  In this regard, I also fear that your antipathy toward my position stems as much from a powerful subconscious irrational loyalty to “Catholic truths” and the traditional authorities as from any “atheism” that you have conspicuously failed to plumb and articulate.  And, Larry, please believe me when I say this, but I am much more afraid of the former in you than the latter.

 Fraternally,

Tony Equale

SPEAKING OF GOD

 

(The following is a long unmodified excerpt taken from Marcus Borg’s 2006 volume Jesus, Uncovering the Life, Teaching, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. The publisher is HarperOne, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishing, New York, pp. 110 – 112.)  My observations and comments are underneath it.

 

SPEAKING OF GOD by Marcus Borg

 

            The notion that God can be experienced is foreign to many in the modern world. Atheists, of course, deny that such experiences are possible, and agnostics are skeptical. But even many Christians in our time find the claim strange. To a considerable extent, this is be­cause the most common modern Western concept of God, shared by Christians as well as by many atheists and agnostics, is that the word “God” refers to a personlike being separate from the universe.  Because this “superbeing” is not here, but somewhere else, “out there,” beyond the universe, God is not a reality that can be experienced.

 

            The term commonly used for this way of thinking of God ― as a being separate from the universe ― is supernatural theism.  This form of theism seems orthodox to many Christians because of its familiarity. Language that speaks of God as a personlike being is common in the Bible. Perhaps the most familiar example is the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven.”  But when taken as a con­cept of God, as the meaning or referent of the word “God,” it is misleading and inadequate, for it is only half of the biblical concept of God. It speaks only of God’s transcendence, God’s beyondness.

 

            The Bible also speaks of God’s presence everywhere and in everything. This is most concisely expressed in words attributed to the apostle Paul: God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17.28).  Note what the language affirms: we live within God, we move within God, we have our existence within God. God is not somewhere else, but right here, all around us, the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is.  Though this notion sounds foreign to some Christians, it really shouldn’t. Most of us heard it while we were growing up: God is everywhere, God is omnipresent. The semi technical term for this is God’s immanence, which means “indwelling.” God dwells in everything, and everything dwells within God.  For the Bible, and for orthodox Christian theol­ogy through the centuries, God is both transcendent and immanent, both more than the universe and present in the universe. 

 

            A term increasingly used to name this way of thinking about God is panentheism.

Its Greek roots indicate its meaning: pan is the Greek word for “all” or “everything”; theism comes from the Greek word for “God,” theos; and the middle syllable en is the Greek word for “in.”  Panentheism affirms that everything is in God, even as it also affirms that God is more than everything.  Though the term is only about two hundred years old, the notion is as ancient as the language of supernatural theism.

 

            But in recent centuries, many Christians began to think of God as only transcendent. The cause of the change was the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century. Before then most Christians thought of God not only as more than the world, but also as present in the world.  The world was shot through with the presence of God.  But the En­lightenment led to a new way of thinking of the universe, as a ­closed system of matter and energy operating in accord with natural forces. In effect the Enlightenment removed God from the universe; nature became disenchanted, the world became desacralized. 

The notion that God is “everywhere,” God’s immanence, was eclipsed. Panentheism was replaced by supernatural theism.

 

            Whether people use the term “panentheism” does not matter. But whether people think of God as only transcendent (supernatural theism) or as both transcendent and immanent (panentheism) does matter.  For many people in our time, supernatural theism is the only concept of God they know, and it often leads to skepticism about God. When somebody says to me, “I don’t believe in God,” my first response is, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.”  Almost always, it’s the God of supernatural theism. Thinking that the Word “God” refers to a being separate from the universe, “out there” and “not here,” is a major cause of modern atheism, agnosticism, and skepticism.  The difference between these two forms of theism matters for an additional reason.  For supernatural theism, God is not here and thus cannot be experienced, except perhaps in moments of supernatural intervention.  This God can only be believed in, not known.  We will know God only after death; in this life we can only believe.  For panentheism, however, God is here, all around us, even as God is also more than everything.  It thus provides a framework for understanding what it means to speak about experiencing God.

 

 SOME OBSERVATIONS (by Tony Equale)

 

I think this is a great statement.  It is expressed very simply.  It avoids difficult concepts and esoteric terminology even while it presents what for most of us must appear to be a radically new way of conceiving “God” and God’s relationship to the universe.  As Borg says, even though the term, panentheism, is new, the notion is ancient.  Throughout this book, Borg shows himself to be a master of the uncomplicated explanation using traditional terms to clarify issues that challenge traditional understanding. 

 

This is a more difficult task than it appears.  Traditional concepts were not designed to convey certain sigificant differences in meaning in the new area.  Efforts at simplicity and restriction to traditional concepts, therefore, can run the risk of an over-simplification that misses the point.

 

For example, Borg explains that panentheism means

 

“what we heard when we were growing up: God is everywhere, God is omnipresent. The semi technical term for this is God’s immanence, which means “indwelling.”  God dwells in everything, and everything dwells within God.” 

 

As good as that statement is, it does not address the fact that the traditional notion imagined God to be present to but separate from the universe of material and living things, like an “invisible man” standing alongside of you, or present to all things by his knowledge.  That traditional image is different from panentheism which says that God’s very being suffuses created reality the way the ocean permeates a sponge.  But even that analogy “limps,” for to say we dwell in God as a sponge in the sea, still imagines that there is some part of the sponge’s organism that is not the sea … while the traditional christian doctrine of God’s immanence implies no such separation or division.  And we must recognize this is ancient traditional christian doctrine, even though it was NOT part of the imagery we were taught when we were growing up.

 

Raimundo Panikkar, the great Catholic theologian, warns us against a notion of indwelling that imagines God as if He were a tenant residing in a corner of the soul.  The concept, he says, should rather be one of complete suffusion and comensurability.  In other words, there is no part of us that is ours and not God’s. 

 

Another point.  Borg also takes pains to suggest that panentheism is biblical; he even quotes from Acts 17 as I do in An Unknown God.  But I think we should be honest and admit that the immanence that is part of our ancient inheritance is not the dominant imagery presented by scripture, neither in the Old nor in the New Testaments.  Immanence is a philosophical concept that derives from the unicity of the concept of being.  Even in the citation from Acts 17 Paul is referring to a Greek poet who is expressing the insight of Greek philosophers, that “in Him we live and move and have our being.”  So, yes, it is definitely in scripture … and indeed in more places than just Acts 17.  But panentheism does not represent the predominant imagery about God in the Bible.  The Bible’s image of God is more like the one we were brought up in, and that in part accounts for why immanence was not part of popular preaching and basic christian education.

 

It might not be out of place to point out that panentheism is much more unambiguously presented in Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts.

 

The last observation I want to make is more academic, and less important.  Borg presents the common opinion that it was with the Enlightenment that the sense of God’s immanence was lost.  I disagree and I have posted a lengthy explanation of my position on this blog, entitled “The Watershed Century.”  Those interested in the topic may read about it there.

 

 

ON BEING KISSED — an allegory and a poem

SPRING, 2009

     When I was an infant, I lived in a garden of endless delight.  I slept, I nursed, I was smothered in hugs and kisses and the cooing, grinning stimulation of my mother. The hugs and kisses were (am I “retrapolating” here?) the most delightful of all, but, and I can say this unequivocally, I was unable to distinguish those endorfic explosions from the other ecstasies in which I swam in the seamless nights and days of baby-time.  I was being kissed, but I did not know it.  I experienced my mother, but I did not know her. I could not separate her kisses from her milk or the bottle, or the warmth of my blanket or the serene dreamless sleep that enfolded me like the safety of the womb.

    Then at some point, I don’t know when, does anyone … ? something resolved itself in my little brain and the real identifiable reality of my mother gelled clear and sharp like binoculars coming into focus.  Her self became clearly distinguished from her nipples, the bottles, the blankets, the clean diaper, the bright lights, the stimulating sounds and the delicious, rapturous embrace of sleep. 

     At that moment I knew that I wasn’t only in paradise … I was being kissed. 

 

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

 

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom

 

IS NOTHING SACRED?

 

   

    My recent attempt to highlight the contribution of John Scotus Eriúgena to the concept of “God,” entitled With Irish Eyes, wasn’t just a love-note to my Hibernian friends. It was intended as another installment in the ongoing struggle to rectify a major defect in Western thought and culture:  We have lost the capacity to see ourselves and our world as sacred.  And the root of that blindness, in my opinion, is not the absence of “God,” but rather precisely the opposite: the fallacious idea of “God” offered by the Christian religion in the traditional form in which we have inherited it.  This is a serious and complex charge.  

    Allow me to present my case. 

   

     I begin with a story.  On a warm May morning in 1889 on a cobble-stoned plaza of Turin, Italy, a vegetable vendor in a state of blind fury at his fallen horse was futilely venting his rage by beating the exhausted animal to death.  Suddenly someone, apparently as out of control as the whipper, lept from the sidelines and fell on the horse in an act of protective embrace.  The appalled onlookers were convinced both men were mad, the first in a way they could understand, the second they could not. 

     The authorities who responded to the melee blamed the disturbance that ensued on the second man’s insane behavior.  It turned out that the “madman” was Friedrich Nietzsche.  He had been living in Turin as a near recluse; his family and friends were aware that he was showing increasing signs of disorientation.  His letters in the immediate aftermath of the incident were so bizarre that they were sure he had a complete mental breakdown.  They came to Italy, gathered him up and brought him to Basel.  He spent the rest of his life … eleven years … in and out of treatment, such as it was, in a state of mental incapacity under the watchful eye of his family.  He died in 1900.

 

    Nietzsche’s “madness” has been uncharitably and most judgmentally interpreted by some Christians as the just payment for a lifetime of attacking the “God” of his father, a christian minister from a small Prussian town.  His offense, in their eyes, was not merely atheism.  It was the passion and the personal venom that he brought to what most believed went well beyond being a philosophical or religious “issue” and had become a campaign to overthrow the Christian religion.  Nietzsche didn’t simply disbelieve; he was on a crusade to exterminate “God.”  “This is what happens,” say his critics, “when you lose respect for what’s sacred.”

 

    But in a moment of quiet reflection someone might be prompted to ask: did the events of that spring morning make you think this was the act of a man for whom nothing was sacred?  Didn’t he seem rather to be someone whose sense of sacredness went far beyond what others could identify as reasonable, or even rational?  Could it be, perhaps, that Nietzsche had come to  believe that everything was sacred, and that he lived in a world where that was insane? 

 

 

    “When God is Gone, Everything is Holy.”  This is the title of a new book by Chet Raymo, science columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of a dozen books, some novels, … all on science and a sense of the sacred.  Raymo considers himself an ex-Catholic, “atheist,” but a man so transfixed by the awesome beauty and creativity of the natural world, that he has no problem calling it “holy.”  I don’t want to get sidetracked into a debate on the quality of the essays in this particular book or the validity of his “position.”  But I consider the title inspired.  I believe it contains a key to an understanding of our world, the Sacred, and the crippled and crippling religions that have traditionally been the vehicle for the Sacred for us.  I want to propose the title as something of a challenge.  I want to explore Raymo’s exquisite paradox. 

    I’ll start with the videtur … the antithesis: One would have thought it would be true that “when ‘God’ is around, everything is holy.”

                                               

    “Everything.”  This seems obvious enough.  “Everything” should mean every thing, right?  Well, here’s part of the problem.  In our tradition, the holy is not everything.  We have inherited some very definite notions of the degree of “holiness” that we attach to different things in our world.  In general, we consider human beings sacred and everything else not sacred.  And the reason for that distinction has to do with another inherited belief of ours: that human beings (and only human beings) have immortal souls.  Our essence is spirit, a reality of a different order altogether from everything else, which is “only” matter.  Unfortunately our bodies are also made of matter, and so we tend to treat them as less than ”holy.”

 

    The strict limitation of “spirit” to what is human functions in practice to dissuade us from seeing other forms of reality as sacred.  In the traditional view, matter is considered flat, one-dimensional, dead, inert ― and profane.  Vitality resides in spirit alone.  If we are holy because we are spirit … and nothing else has spirit, then nothing else is holy.  Belief in the human spirit has been used to justify the de facto domination of the human species over everything else by calling it dominion.  We have been taught that spirit gives us ownership over the entire universe … with the right to do with it whatever we want. 

    Where did that come from?

 

    “Spirit,” in the traditional view, is not only holy because it is a superior order of being, but because it supposedly makes us like “God” who is “Spirit.”  It’s something no other creature can claim.  And because we are like “God,” we are immortal.  Our bodies appear to live and die just like the mere animals we see dying around us, but despite the obvious similarities we claim we are “spirits” and we will live forever; they won’t. 

 

    Humans alone are “holy.”  But even within the human family, we make sharp distinctions … between which belief-systems (meaning ideas of “God’) are “holy,” and which are not.  And then, based on the identity of people once associated with primitive culture, considered the most unholy of all, we maintain a racial and ethnic prejudice against them.  The unholiness spreads.  Our feelings run so deep on the question of religion, that “what is holy” has been the perennial justification if not the cause of the endless avalanche of slaughter that we heap on one another.  It almost defines us as a species.

 

    “God.”  Please note: all these distinctions are associated with “God.”  When “God” is around, these distinctions are functioning.  By “around,” of course, I don’t mean the presence of God, I mean the active application of the traditional idea of “God.”  When christians think about the “God” they were taught to believe in, all sorts of things become “unholy.”

 

    Some may claim these are street-level popular distortions, they do not represent the more precise formulations of the authorities who are responsible for correct “doctrine.”  I beg to differ.  For example: the spirit / matter division and its association with the sacred / profane split is proclaimed as “core doctrine” by the authorities.  Catholics call it de fide definita and can point to papal and concilar pronouncements that make it “infallible.” 

    Another example:  The Roman church proclaims itself the “only true church,” thus making a further distinction within the category of christians.  All other christians  are in “gross error,” not a very holy label.   These are the words of as august a source as the Second Vatican Council. 

 

    As we get deeper into those circles where “God” is “around,” we are finding that fewer and fewer things are “holy.”

 

    Many christian churches, the Roman church prominent among them, promote a moral code they claim is the will of “God” … and therefore commanded for everyone to obey, even non-Romans.  On the basis of these beliefs, these churches have no qualms about  stridently condemning behavior that many responsible and mature adults consider moral ― behavior that is protected by law.  Hence new divisions are made among us separating out those whose behavior is deemed “evil” by certain “religious authorities.”  The holy, under the watchful eye of these authorities, becomes more and more restricted.  In one case, in the Roman Church, one particular activity which the authorities insist is “intrinsically evil” is flouted, polls show, by 75% of its own members.  That makes a lot of people “unholy.”  But christian churches generally also teach that all people are “sinners,” born in sin because of the Original Sin of Adam, and incapable of not sinning.  So to say the belief that “everything is holy” is promoted by “the authorities,” is simply not true.  In fact, one might be tempted to say that when the idea of “God” is permanently around, as it is in the minds of religious authorities, almost nothing is holy.

             

    “Sometimes the idea of God that is formed is so fallacious, that it’s rejection can hardly be considered atheism.”  I’m sure you’ve heard that statement.  So before you damn me as a Nietzschean “Zarathusthra,” proclaiming the death of “God,” let me make it clear that I have been talking exclusively about the idea of “God” that we have received from our traditional christian sources.  I claim that idea is false.  This, after all, may have been the intent of Nietzsche’s poetry, to exterminate that idea of “God.”  I insist you understand that I am attacking that idea, the people and institutions that promote that idea, and the reasons they use to justify that idea.  Please realize: our idea of “God” is not God, our religious institutions and communities are not God, and our religious authorities are not God.  

 

    I would go even further than the above statement of Vatican II and say that sometimes the fallacious word and concept “God” have dominated the psychic landscape for so long, have been promulgated with such awesome authority and imposed with such implacable severity that for some people no amount of “correction” can liberate the term from the chains that bind it to its crippling imagery.  In such cases the people so affec­ted must reject the term, for the term and its idea totally obliterates the holy. They have no choice.  If they don’t, the Sacred itself will be lost to them, and with it their humanity.  We are not playing games here.  This cannot be allowed to happen.

 

    Gone.  So to say “God” is “gone” for me means to be rid of the suffocating imagery, the “fallacious idea” that stands in the way of our appreciation of the Sacred.  I think of it as shutting down the boom-box that’s drowning out the faint background hum of our cosmic origins.  Or it’s like turning off glaring floodlights to let our night-vision return, and our other senses, like touch, come alive again, so we can regain the ability to grope in the darkness.  For what we’re after, say the mystics, lives in a cloud of unknowing.

 

    There’s a reason why our great teachers warned us again and again that ultimately everything we said about “God” had to be denied, negated.  We know nothing, nothing.  If there is wisdom in this Sacred universe, its ultimate depths are so beyond our ken that we have to say it’s not wisdom.  If there is something to which we are tempted to apply the word “person,” it is not a person as we know it and may even be closer to what we call impersonal.  And even that, in turn, must be denied.  If it is existence, we must be aware that it is not only no-thing, but more aptly described as “Nothing,” “not there” as we are there. 

 

    According to our teachers, like Eriúgena, there is no word we can use that won’t trap us in fallacy.  So he says it’s ineffable, unspeakable, unknowable.  He calls it non-being, Nothing, and it’s out of this Nothing that we have come.  This Nothing, then, becomes Something like me and you; and it’s only that sacred Something that we can see, know, and speaks “God.”  Nothing else. There is nothing “there” but this Nothing-become-Some­thing … our sacred universe … us ….

 

     This stands in stark contrast with the imagery of “God” that we have been fed by our religions.  “God,” they say, is a separate person-entity, who just like us, sees, thinks, has preferences, gives orders, can be angered, pleased, insulted, enraged, relates to us humans collectively and individually.  And so we pray.  He wants us to behave in specified ways, otherwise he will punish us, either here or hereafter.  And so we pray.  For his part, we are taught, he makes certain things happen and other things to not happen in accord with his will.  This “God,” in spite of being “spirit,” can and does act in our material world; he is all powerful, can do anything at all, and because of his oversight and power we can assume that if anything occurs, no matter what it is, “God” had to have willed it.  And so we pray.  This “belief,” which is so hard to believe, so contrary to our everyday experience and the Goodness of “God,” inevitablly entails the following, all too  commonplace phenomenon:

 

    “Atheism not rarely results from a violent protest against evil in this world.”  Another brilliant insight from Vatican II.  Permit me to borrow a word from the kids: “duh”!  What do you expect?  You set “God” up with the unbelievable idea of a naïve micro-managed “divine providence” referred to in the paragraph above.  This “God” that the ancient biblical authors imagined acts physically in our world and in our history does not exist.  The real God does nothing.  Please look around you, and open your eyes.  Stop expecting “God” to be like you, and look at what She actually does. 

    Some may ask, well, if the world runs by itself, why do we need a “God” at all? 

     “God” is our existence.  It’s what we are.  We would not be here without it.  Eriú­gena’s way of saying it is that “God’s” Love has become this material universe.  That’s what we are.  And that’s why “God’s” activity is limited to the matter he has chosen to assume, for without those limits there would be no theo­phany and “God” would not “be” … and neither would we.  Creation is “God” externalized for viewing.  God shares her being with us, that’s what she does … that’s ALL she does … and that’s what the universe is, and what we are, and why it is all sacred.

 

    With Eriúgena’s vision, Raymo’s thesis stands.  When the fallacious idea of “God” we inherited from our fundamentalist tradition is “gone,” everything ― meaning every thing, including the very dust under our feet ― is sacred.  There are diamonds on the soles of your shoes.  “When God is gone, everything is holy.”  And the material world is sacred because the “Nothing” that lies at the heart of matter turned itself inside out, as it were, for us, transforming itself from Nothing into Something … and that Something, the existential energy of formless matter, developed into us.  That energy still drives us.  There’s a reason why our “flesh” is hopelessly focused on love.  “God” is like a Great Mother.  We are formed from the cells of her body; we are built of her blood and bones.  We breathe and are breathed with the breath of her mouth.  

     Our flesh is the breath of “God.”

 

 

WITH IRISH EYES: THE UNIVERSE AS THEOPHANY

 

    During the millennium that followed the Roman theocracy’s divinization of the Christian Church, the same dualism that separated reality into matter and spirit, sowing the seeds of a schizoid denigration of the flesh, also, ironically, created a deeply mystical sense of the intimate presence of an immanent “God.”  These distinctly antithetical currents dominated the Western cultural mindset relatively unchallenged until the 14th century. 

  

    It was belief in the existence of a world of spirits, that set matter off in a state of metaphysical inferiority, opening the door to prejudicial divisions that, while they were repeatedly rejected as philosophically erroneous, exercised a mesmerizing effect on the imagination.  Matter was as close to an “evil thing” as you could get.  Hence “flesh” was taken as the source of all our problems.  For Christian Platonists like Origen of Alexandria, the disrespect for the body and its functions, as if it were a separate depraved entity conspiring against the detached purity of a captive spirit, ruled all programs of personal formation. 

 

    Aristotle had clearly denounced any conceptualization that imagined matter and form as other than principles of being, … and declared them non-existent apart from their co-presence in the concrete individual.  “Form” for him was not, as it was for Plato, a separate “idea-entity” independently existing in the Mind of God.  But Aristotle’s corrections were ignored.  The West clung to the Platonic Paradigm and with it the notion of a “World of Ideas” which translated to the “Mind of God.”  This fed a deep mystical pool that stood in the center of the Western landscape.  It opened a third eye that saw all things as the reflected images of divine perfection.  A little stillness, it said, and we could actually hear the echoes of the Divine Voice that called us forth.  This world might be a shadow world, but what it shadowed was nothing less than God Himself. 

           

    Furthermore, the Master Mind that thought it all, also held it all in the one pure passionate embrace of His own existence.  From this vision came the sense of a divine presence, more interior to things than they to themselves, providing them everything: what, that, how, and why they were.  It made the world a sacred place, the residence of a Lover-God who used this universe to put Him/Herself on shameless display for all to see, desire and pursue.  It was a world teeming with living wonders and gardens of endless delight.  The universe was a “theophany,” a “God-Show,” a heaven on earth.

 

    These two contrary, if not contradictory streams, which drew their courses from the same spring, shared a tenuous co-existence.  For a thousand years the toxic potential of their incompatibility was blithely overlooked because of the uncanny balance provided by this two-edged sword.  We forgot that one part of this vision could tear your flesh and spirit asunder and leave you immobilized with self-loathing … because the other would play the gentlest of summer breezes on your cheek: God’s tender sigh of intimate love. 

   In any case, the Platonic vision explained it all.

 

John Scotus Eriúgena

 

          It was in this context that John Scotus Eriúgena worked, read, prayed and wrote in the ninth century.

   He was Irish.  That’s what Eriúgena means. Erse. Sometimes it’s written “Erigena.”  It’s used in combination with Scot, or Scottus which signified the very same thing, referring to all who lived beyond Hadrian’s wall, and on whatever islands that faced into the wind in the frigid seas of the North.

    John knew Greek.  He translated Pseudo-Dionysius and had read the Cappadocian Fathers; their doctrines were central to his thought.  How he came to be one of the few men in all of Europe who could read Greek was a well kept secret of the Irish monasteries that preserved learning like a polished stone hidden in the darkness of the times.  These were not easy days for bookish endeavors.  The Great Heathen Army of Danes, Vikings and other uninvited guests from less hospitable regions spent the better part of the century plundering their way into the warm hearths of the Carolingian household. 

    It was this well-known erudition, nurtured for so long in these monasteries just then becoming the targets of Viking incursions, that brought John in 845 from his scholar’s cell in Ireland to the court of Charles the Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne and the very heir of Caesar himself.  Charles was shakily enthroned in the land of the Franks, eternally defending his “holy empire” against the invading hordes.  He was not always successful.  Paris itself was burned by Norse raiders in 856, eleven years after Eriúgena responded to the call of the king to promote education in the semi-barbaric European main­land. 

    John was one of the many educated monks drawn from Ireland in the centuries after the Roman collapse and sent to spread learning in the monastery schools like Laon and Compiègne in France (where John may have lived), and then eastward to Reichenau and Fulda in what was later to become Germany.  Education in Western Europe was dependent on the steady flow of scholars from Ireland.[1]  But he was not just one more teacher-monk.  Because of his direct contact with Greek sources, the sweep of his theological vision and the audacity he employed in saying what he saw, he became what many consider the greatest thinker in the West between Augustine and Aquinas.[2]

 

His doctrines

 

    His doctrine was unique and often stands in stark contrast to elements of the Augustinian synthesis, which dominated Western theology from the 5th century until displaced by Aristotelian scholasticism in the 13th. 

 

    In an early work on the Eucharist, now lost, Eriúgena defended his belief in the symbolic presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  We consume Christ, he said mente non dente … a position not yet considered heretical.[3]  He agreed with Augustine in this regard.  Commentators remark that for Augustine as for all the Fathers, the literal presence of Christ was not an issue … because it was not the point.

 

    Then in 851, Eriúgena became embroiled in a controversy over Augustine’s doctrine of predestination with a Saxon monk named Gottschalk.  Gottschalk interpreted Augus­tine (many feel, correctly) to say that there was a double predestination.  Since, according to Augustine, no one can be saved without God’s grace (and it is the grace that actually achieves salvation), it followed that those who were not saved must have been denied sufficient grace and were, in effect, predestined to be damned.  God willed some to heaven and some to hell.

 

    In his counter argument, presented in the tract, On Predestination, Eriúgena said that God’s Simplicity and unmitigated Goodness prevents Him from even knowing evil, much less permitting (willing) that a human being should ever commit evil, which is the implication of double predestination.  God’s will, said Eriúgena, is simply that all should be saved. More­over, there is no such place as “hell,” God could not will or create any such thing.  Hell is simply the anguish felt at being separated from God ― a self-imposed exile.  (Later, in the Periphyseon he will spiritualize “paradise” as well, denying that it is a place and offer instead that it is a symbol of the potential happiness of the human being enfolded in the love of God. Thus paradise, like hell, is a perception, a state pf mind.)  Extraordinary for a mediaeval Christian?  Indeed.  Eriúgena was reprimanded by a synod held at Valence in 855.  His work was dismissed by the gathered clerics as pultes scotorum, “Irish Porridge.”

 

    But it was in his greatest work, written in the 860’s which he called Periphyseon and later titled On the Division of Nature, that he was to display his metaphoric vision of a universe that radiated the presence and Goodness of God.  His innovations in thought and expression were predictably more than the Western Roman mindset could absorb, and the Periphyseon, in turn, was condemned repeatedly after his death, first in the eleventh century and then in the 13th and again in the 16th. 

 

    The key to his presentation is a fourfold division of “Nature” into (1) nature that is uncreated and creates, (2) nature that is created and creates, (3) nature that is created and does not create and (4) nature that is uncreated and does not create.  Thus begins a long dialogue between master and student.  This “Irish riddle” is soon explained: the first is God the creator, the second, the primordial causes (Plato’s “subsistent forms” in the Mind of God.  Among these some commentators, like Moran, include “formless matter.”), the third is our finite universe of created things, and the fourth is God as the goal of the great return of all things to their source.

 

    The first indication of the grand synthesis this work portends is the all-encompassing scope of the word “Nature” in which God is obviously included.  So, right from the very start, the “divisions” are declared to be merely separate ways of looking and speaking about one and the same thing, Nature.  Then we are quickly introduced to the concept that will function throughout the work like a leitmotif, used to explain the relationship of Creator and creature: theophany. 

 

    Theophany means, as we’ve suggested, a “God-display.”  For Eriúgena, in creation God “comes-to-be” (fieri), because the visible things of this world give visible form to the One-Who-Has-No-Form … just as a “formless” human intellect can be said not “to be” anything until it actually is “informed” by the things it knows, similarly, says Eriúgena, the divine nature is rightly said to be created (creari) as it creates the things that subsist only from It and through It and in It and for It. (I, 454C)  The divine nature, in making itself manifest, makes itself “to be” “God” for us. 

                               

    An element of background for this imagery is the neo-Platonic tradition of referring to God as “non-being,” nothing, meaning superessential, indefinable by any distinction of forms, unknowable and therefore not “being,” (being and intelligibility being equated.)  From that angle, calling God nothing means “more than being.”  It is out of this nothing, then, that God creates.  For Eriúgena, ex nihilo means that the universe is not only made by God (a Deo) but from God (ex Deo), it is “God-stuff,” following the Eastern Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea.  Creation then is the finite display of the divine nature which otherwise would have remained inaccessible in the absolute darkness of its infinity, it’s nothingness.  Creation is God making Himself something that can be known both by us and by Him.

 

    It’s especially in Book III, where Eriúgena is trying to elucidate his vision of the intrinsic make-up of the created universe that “theophany” is given its unexpected depths and awesome scope: 

 

“For whatever, in things, is truly understood to subsist, is nothing other than the Ineffable Nature of Divine Goodness. … It alone truly and properly has being in everything, and nothing except itself truly and properly has being … we should not therefore understand God and creation as two different things, but as one and the same.  For creation subsists in God and God is created in creation in a remarkable and ineffable way, manifesting Himself, and though invisible, making Himself visible, and though incomprehensible, making Himself comprehensible, and though unknown, making Himself known, though lacking in form and species, endowing Himself with form and species, though superessential, making Himself essential, though supernatural, making Himself natural, though simple making Himself compound, … though infinite, making Himself finite, … though above time, making Himself temporal, though above place, making Himself local, though creating everything, making Himself created in everything. 

       The Maker of all, is made in all and, though motionless, moves into everything and becomes all things in all things.  [Creation is] the ineffable condescension of the Highest Good … to things with being in order that they may have being, or rather that It Itself may be in everything from the highest down, always eternal, always made by Itself in Itself, … and while eternal, It does not cease to be made, and though made, It does not cease to be eternal and makes Itself from Itself.  It has no need of other matter besides Itself, in which it makes Itself.  Otherwise It would seem impotent and imperfect in Itself if It received from another source any assistance toward Its appearance and perfection. 

       From Himself, then, God receives the occasions for His theophanies i.e., His divine appearances since “all things are from Him, through Him, in Him and directed toward Him.”  Hence matter itself, from which, as we read, he made the world, is from Him and in Him and He is in it insofar as it is understood to have being. …[4]

 

… Formless matter, says Eriúgena, approximates the formlessness of divine wisdom which looks to no standard above itself for its formation and which is the infinite exemplar of all other forms.[5]

 

    In this same section of Book III, following on his theme that God makes Himself “to be,” i.e., “creates” Himself in created theophanies and thus “makes” Himself manifest, knowable, Eriúgena dares to claim that this is not just for our benefit:

 

the Divine Nature … allows Itself to appear in its theophanies, willing to emerge from the most hidden recesses of its nature in which it is unknown even to Itself, that is, knows Itself in nothing because It is infinite and supernatural and superessential and beyond everything that can and cannot be understood, but by descending into the principles of things, and, as it were, creating Itself, It begins to know Itself in something. (III 689B)[6]

 

    Eriúgena’s fourth “division” of Nature, namely nature that is “uncreated and does not create” refers to God as the attractive pole of all change, motion and becoming ― what Teilhard would call Omega.  It is the process of theophany in its return to its Source, the irresistible Divine Nature, object of all longing and all process in the Universe.  This return is classic neo-Platonic doctrine.  It insists that the process in which all things “become divinized” in the Return, the reditus, is entirely natural.  It is the inevitable process of Universal Nature itself.  The redemption does not create the Return, it simply enhances it, drawing it into the loving relations of the Word in the Trinity within which creation originally proceeded.

 

    Extraordinary!  Eriúgena himself was aware of the resistance his ideas would meet, and the very end of the Periphyseon reflects his foreboding.

 

    Recent commentary sees Eriúgena as the forerunner of later 18th and 19th century Idealism.[7]  His notions of defining God as non-being went further than the usual neo-Platonic terminology for superessentialism and explored the role of negation in the processes of creation and theophany.  These bear premonitions of later existentialism.  Observers have also drawn attention to the similarity of Eriúgena with the 14th century neo-Platonist Meister Eckhart.  In both men, the concept of nothingness plays an important role in explaining our relationship to an unknowable God.

 

The eye of the eagle

 

    Eriúgena looks at the world with new eyes.  In his homily on the prologue of John’s Gospel, he will draw attention to the eyes of the eagle that gave the evangelist such a panoramic view of the Light that overcomes our darkness. 

 

What sort of light, John asks, is possible for us in this life where we are born but to die, grow but to decay, congeal but to be dissolved again, falling from the restfulness of silent nature into the restlessness of bustling misery?  Tell me please, what kind of spiritual and true light is there for those people born into a transitory and false life?  Is not precisely this world a fit dwelling for those alienated from true Light?  Is it not justly called the region of the shadow of death, the valley of tears, the abyss of ignorance, the earthly habitation that weighs down the human soul and expels the true beholding of the Light from the inner eyes? 

 

Mixing metaphors, this Light for John is the Word, and the Word is this world … spoken into existence along with the loving utterance of the Word by the Father:

 

… in the created universe as a whole, the Word is the true Light that subsists now and always has, because it never ceases to subsist in all things.

       For just as in the case of one who speaks, when he stops speaking, his voice ceases and disappears, so also with the heavenly Father, should He stop speaking his Word, the effect of his Word ― the created universe ― would cease to subsist.  For the continuous maintenance by subsistence ― the very continuance ― of the created universe is the speech of God the Father, the eternal and unchangeable generation of his Word.[8]

 

---

[1] Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Pr, p.2

[2] Deirdre Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena, NY: Oxford U. Press, 2000, p.13

[3] Moran, p.24

[4] Johannes Scotus Eriúgena, Periphyseon, tr, Uhlfelder, Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1974, III [17] pp.196-198

[5] Joannis Scoti Erigenae, De Divisione Naturae, Oxford: Sheldon, 1681, reprinted Frankfurt Am Main: Minerva, 1964 (III,XIX) p.127, translation mine.

[6] Carabine,  p.36

[7] Moran, passim

[8] Christopher Bamford The Voice of the Eagle, Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books, 1990, pp 100-102

THE WATERSHED CENTURY

The Watershed Century, 17th or 14th ?

        Many observers accept the standard wisdom that modern times entered with the scientistic rationalism of the 17th century. They see the definitive mind-body split resulting in the mechanization of the universe set in stone with Newtonian physics and Descartes’ definition of matter as res extensa opposed to mind as res cogitans.

          But, I see modern “disenchantment” as the cumulative effect of the endemic dualism of the west, … a disenchantment that became clearly noticeable in the 14th century.  The enlightenment, in my view, simply put the capstone on a process already well underway.  It is my contention that from ancient times, western christian ideology contained elements that were so out of touch with reality as to be ultimately untenable – a catastrophe waiting to happen. 

         The catastrophe occurred in the 14th century.  This all became agonizingly clear when Wes­tern christians found themselves categorically incapable of accepting the plague of 1348 as a random occurrence; and the result was an avalanche of anguish and alienation from which the west never recovered.  The “God” of Augustinian providence and predestination, eternally insulted by “original sin,” came to be seen as a punitive monster “Spirit,” alien to this world of matter and eternally hostile to humankind.  That disenchanted universe ruled by a distant, angry, narcissistic “God” was the one I was raised in.  But it had began three hundred years even before Descartes and Newton.  Many still live in it today.

         Consider:  (1) There is just as profound a hatred and fear of the “flesh” in Augus­tine of Hippo (5th c), Francesco Petrarch (14th) and Thomas à Kempis (15th), as you will find in any “modern” post-enlightenment writer.  Alie­n­ation from the body and a disdain for matter was not an invention of the 17th century.  (2) There is a deeper cynicism about the ability of reason to assure itself of the traditional elements of the religious world-view, namely the existence of “spirit,” and the afterlife of reward and punishment, in the Franciscan William of Ockham (d.1348) than in René Descartes and Isaac Newton.  By making a fetish of the triumphs of “reason,” the enlightenment actually reaffirmed a philosophical belief in “spirit” that the 14th century had claimed could no longer be “proven.”  And (3) there was more skepticism about the operations of divine providence in Juliana of Norwich and Geoffrey Chaucer (1385) than in Alexander Pope (18thc) or John Milton.  The breakdown of the “Alchemist” vision of a divinely permeated sacred universe was well underway by 1400. 

         It is my opinion that the marked increase in the persecution and expulsions of Jews, the expansion and intensification of the inquisition, the birth of a money economy ruled by usury and avarice in which the Church itself was a major player, the perpetration on a massive scale of outrageous injustices on primitive  peoples accomplished with the open complicity of the Church – all phenomena of the 15th and 16th centuries, before the enlightenment – were symptoms of the breakdown of the hieratic vision and communitarian spirit of mediaeval christianity.  In the 17th century the separation of “God” from material creation, begun in the 14th, was completed by the advent of “modern science.”  The enlightenment scientists believed that “God,” like a clockmaker, had set the material universe in motion, but otherwise had nothing to do with it, because “He” was spirit, and “it” was matter.

         To my mind, 17th century rationalism gave dualism a new lease on life by “scientifically” confirming the separation of the spiritual from the physical, – quarantining spiritual elements and preventing them from being contaminated by the dead passive docility of matter.  Matter became a flat and transparent mechanism, absolutely devoid of life, and “spirit” was encouraged to flourish “in its own sphere” unaffected by any intrusive clamor arising from matter (the body) which it was destined to conquer and discard.  The “spirits” whose existence a discredited platonism could no longer guarantee in the 14th century, were set firmly on their feet by Descartes’ cogito in the 17th, under the rubric of reason - as precisely that-which-conquered-and-controlled-matter and therefore had to be there.  Thus, it re-esta­blished the independence of the mind separate from the body more securely than ever before.  “Spirit” now, enjoyed a renewed respect as “reason,” the power that rendered matter tractable and transparent.  It was an age of inevitable other-worldliness as spirit became even more convinced that it did not belong to this material world and struggled in vain to understand why it was here at all.  Escape, i.e., “salvation” and its foretaste in religious or esthetic rapture, alone made any sense.  Our life belonged to another world.  And death was accepted by being absorbed into the universal disdain for matter and the body.  Does this sound familiar?  It was the traditional christian spirituality, in all fundamentals unchanged since Augustine’s time.  I was born into this vision.  It’s what religious life was all about.

        Why is this of any more than academic interest?  Because it dispels the myth that what “disenchanted” the world was “modern science” and not “religion.”  I contend that the enlightenment mindset was a subroutine of perennial christian ideology.  The “modern” world-view was the culmination of a growing disenchantment latent in Roman christian thinking from early on, and which burst forth like the pustules of the plague when the Augustinian doctrines of “original hostility” and the corruption of the flesh came to dominate the perception of the world in the 14th century.  It was the 14th century that saw the fatal crack in the world-view built on an untenable, pathological dualism.  If the West was not shizoid and alienated throughout the prior millennium, it was only because these monstrous elements of Augus­tine’s theology – original sin and divine predestination – had never before been given such exclusive authority to explain events.

        Earlier, in the 9th century, as expressed by Eriugena in the imagery of the Cappadocian Fathers, material creation was called the “theophany” of “God,” the outward expression of “God’s” creative immanent presence.  All this evaporated in the searing conflagration of the plague.  The Plague could not be explained in Roman (Augustinian) categories without declaring that a non-resident “God” was insulted, enraged and pitilessly punitive.  The culprit, in other words was and, to my mind, remains, Roman christian ecclesiastical ideology which always clutched a flesh-hating dualism and an absurd insulted “God” to its bosom.  The enthusiasms of the 17th century simply reaffirmed and set on a more solid intellectual footing, the very same human self-loathing that tormented christians since ancient times.  It’s what drove Origen to castrate himself.  That was 235 c.e.  The enlightenment reinforced and intensified these elements of the western chris­tian view of the world.  And in that view “matter,” and our flesh with it, was lower than excrement, hated by “God,” corrupt by nature and deserving of punishment.  The sufferings of life for human beings were explained as the abiding wrath of “God” torturing us in the dungeon of our own flesh.  How “disenchanted” can you get?

         It was Augustine’s conception of what “original sin” had done to corrupt the human body and all material creation with it, that wracked Petrarch’s soul in the 14th century, that fed Thomas à Kempis’ world-hating isolation in the 15th, that explained Luther’s contorted “justification” in the 16th, that provided the subject for Pascal’s pensées in the 17th in which he called marriage “the lowest of the conditions of life permitted to a christian.”  The “disenchantment of the world” was the demonization of matter and with it the human body; it was a central element of western christianity’s “spirituality” since at least the third century of the common era.  The enlightenment simply recapitulated it all in a new key: the key of Cartesian geometry. 

         There are many thinkers who see the Enlightenment as the force that turned us away from a sacred universe to one that was dead, flat, inert and devoid of any divine presence.  I present this commentary as a defense and explication of my own position.

 

Tony