The Dance Hall of the Dead

The knights of reason get things right in the hard world of concepts, but for inspiration we look to poets, visionaries, and to mystics. Storytellers belong to the latter tribe, albeit at the humbler working level, hence we often learn something about mysterious and hidden matters from novels and the like. From Tony Hillerman we have The Dance Hall of the Dead, a vivid glimpse into the religious life of the Zuni Indians, a tiny group, part of the Pueblo Indians, about 12,000 all told today, less than 8,000 living the Pueblo life. Yet in that obscure and ancient tradition lives a mythological conception you will find echoing the experiences of Swedenborg, say, of the Tao Te Ching, with hints of reincarnation included. But it takes poetic imagination to do the fusion I’m suggesting.

Here is a summary in Hillerman’s novel put into the mouth of a fictitious Franciscan, Father Ingles. Ingles is speaking.

“What made me think of Kothluwalawa was that business of the dance hall. If you translate that word into English it means something like ‘Dance Hall of the Dead,’ or maybe ‘Dance Ground of the Spirits,’ or something like that.” Ingles smiled. “Rather a poetic concept. In life, ritual dancing for the Zuni is sort of a perfect expression of …” He paused, searching for the word. “Call it ecstasy, or joy, or community unity. So what do you do when you’re beyond life, with no labors to perform? You spend your time dancing.”

Now it turns out that this place, in scholarship as well as in the novel, is a sacred lake near the place where the Zuni river joins the Little Colorado in Arizona. Its formal name is Ko-tluwallawa. Ko stands for “god” and “tluwallawa” for town, city, or pueblo. Thus the name really means “god-town” and also, as I will rapidly show, the Abode of the Dead.

To quote a scholar (A.L. Kroeber, link) here is the original myth of how the watery Dance Hall of the Dead came about: “As the ancient people crossed the [Zuni] river, the mothers dropped their pinching and biting children, who turned into tadpoles, frogs, turtles, and other aquatic animals and descended to the ‘god town’ in the sacred lake, and there at once became the kokko.”

Now the knights of reason will have some problem with that myth—and doubly so when they are told that for the Zuni the word kokko means “gods.” In the Zuni conception the dead are gods—much as in Swedenborg’s writings all angels are former humans. This view has greatly puzzled scholars; they’ve evidently ignored or dismissed voices like Swedenborg’s. The kokko, mind you, aren’t God. That person, in Zuni culture, is Awonawilona, the supreme being, thought of as bisexual, referred to as He-She, the giver of life and present everywhere. Parsed apart further (by Kroeber), the word really means He-She who owns all roads, paths, and ways—and someone like me can’t help but immediately to think of the Tao.

The hint of reincarnation I mentioned above comes from a Zuni belief that every person has an appointed path his or her own—completion of which is mandatory and may not be cut short by suicide, however caused, including excessive grief. Those who thus violate the dispensation must complete that path first before they can descend into the sacred lake and take up their dance in the Dance Hall of the Dead. What little literature is readily available to me does not describe how “finishing the interrupted path” might be accomplished, but it does strike me that in Ian Stevenson’s studies most of the cases of people who recall previous lives feature individuals who died young and by violent means. They remember interrupted lives.

The Framing is the Picture

While genuine curiosity is always present in humanity, institutionalized forms of it depend on the presence of a suitable ideology. Scientific study of so-called miraculous events, for example, is not undertaken. The scientific ideology just can’t work with the phenomena as these are actually experienced. Let us take something odd like bi-location, thus a person appearing in two places at the same time. Based on the scientific view, bi-location is impossible. Those who claim to have observed it are simply labeled credulous. If such a claim is ever scientifically investigated, the aim of the study is to prove its falsity. Similarly, the Vatican does undertake careful investigation of miracles, but always as part of a process of canonization, not as a general (scientific) undertaking. Thus the Vatican does not investigate claims of miracles surrounding Hindu or Muslim saints. Much as science has a strong view of the necessarily physical causation of any symptoms others might label miraculous, so also the Vatican has a strong view of the causation of miracles; these are necessarily God’s interventions.

For these reasons, we always find evidence for the miraculous in settings where the ideology colors the whole situation. Here and there, in the last two centuries, we’ve seen some few departures from this general tendency. These have been rare because a person, however well-qualified as a scientist, will draw tribal attacks if he or she wanders off the reservation. In the nineteenth century, before the establishment of Science with a leading cap, we have the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research by an elite. An example from our own time is Ian Stevenson, a trained medical man and biochemist, who investigated reincarnation. Near Death Experience studies represent another interesting cluster, also initiated by a doctor, Raymond Moody. NDE work has taken on a certain legitimacy precisely because Moody’s work was then taken up by multiple teams of other physicians—always those who were exposed to the phenomenon directly.

The point I’m after today, however, is not that “fringe” elements in science have “dared” to “dabble” in heresy—and have to some extent “gotten away” with it. Especially in NDE work, fame and fortune—if not in academic circles—may be achieved by heresy. The thought I had was that if the medium is the message, sometimes the framing is the picture. The extraordinary gifts that infrequently become visible surrounding saints or would-be saints—I’m thinking here of Padre Pio, who is, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth who isn’t yet, and Bruno Gröning who never shall be—appear to me to be of the greatest interest. These are modern people; they’ve all lived during my life time; indeed I once lived a mere handful of miles away from Therese’s town during and after World War II. But I know of many scores of others who’ve lived in the past—and in every culture of the globe. The same stories surround them—albeit figures with stigmata are strictly in Catholic realms, which is itself worthy of careful note. The linkage between reincarnation studies and stigmata has never been noted, except, perhaps, by me (here). But as for other capacities these people have displayed, they are the same: bi-location, precognition, healing and other powers. Each is embedded in a religious culture which explains each in his or her own framing. The total phenomenon, as an established reality, has never been examined as it were objectively, as phenomena but yet with full acceptance of the observed realities. By full acceptance here I mean that to understand these people’s lives, experiences, and actions necessarily requires acceptance of a much more extended kind of reality than we believe surrounds us. (Here I provide this link to some reports on Padre Pio by way of illustration of the nature of this evidence—and how we actually encounter it).

Time still hides many things. The inertial pull of this dimension is enormous, but in due time genuine knowledge of these phenomena, which straddle the zones of here and over there, may become better understood—although, I suspect, never by more than just a minority. As genuine curiosity is always present, there will always be those with one foot in the borderzone.

The Wise on Evil

The Buddha found the roots of evil in desire, which makes sense. If I don’t ever want anything I’ll never experience conflict. But this observation can be rendered in milder form as well. In an environment where resources are very ample and accessible and people are few in number, the sum total of evil is bound to be less than in a very complex and crowded environment where resources are limited and indeed artificially designed to extract effort to obtain. In a vast, rich society such as ours, no sooner does a baby arrive than some parents already begin to scheme to get it into an elite kindergarten when it’s old enough. Desire rises, waves of it tower up, and the whole civilization behaves like a vast, standing tsunami of desire, millions all yelling, me, me, me. Everything’s in conflict, from social items on my calendar, to getting a word in edgewise, and it just goes on.

In a way the Buddha’s is a fundamental insight because it anchors evil in the subjective experience and leaves out all detail. Neither free will, nor time, nor yet discernment of different kinds of goods are present here, and conflicts between them. The source of desire is left unmentioned. Socrates focus on ignorance, suggesting that whatever people do they view as good; evil deeds therefore arise because apparent good is chosen over real; here it is hard to find a place for the notion of a troubled conscience prospective or otherwise. Plotinus, for whom reality is an emanation from the Ultimate and thinning out with distance, as it were, the material realm is the lowest and least containing genuine being. Hence evil is linked to the material dimension. Augustine echoes this; evil is non-being or, better yet, a privation of being. Free will and knowledge converge in Ockham. Evil for him was failure to do what what we’re obliged to do. That failure is only possible if we know both, can distinguish between them, and are free to choose. But desire is also implicit in it; why would we avoid our obligation if avoiding were not more desirable.

All of these snippets throw varying amounts of light on a vast subject. I’m cribbing here from the Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion’s article on Evil—which doesn’t mention Aristotle or Aquinas. Among moderns it mentions Schelling, of whom I’ve read nothing, and Berdyaev, whom I’ve read very carefully. Berdyaev is a half-forgotten modern apostle of free will.

A distillation of the wise does produce an interestingly strong balsamic vinegar. Desire is rooted in matter most of the time or can be linked back to the presence of others when in manifests it unwholesome but mental forms like dominance and envy, to name two. But is it evil to desire wisdom? I suspect the Buddha might have thought so. Awareness is fundamental. Animals follow their desires without the least tinge of guilt. And an awareness of time is present in it—in that the greater good we are obliged to choose (Ockham) may lie as yet unborn and hidden by the future. Socrates touches upon the paradox of good—namely that once we know it is irresistible. And here concepts like Augustine’s come in handy because he suggests that knowledge is not quite enough if we are a kind of blend of being and not-yet being, a kind of ghost in the solid eternities of matter.

Fact, Fiction, and In-Between

One of the more interesting lenses by which to examine the subject of “faith” is through the lens of reincarnation—a subject touched on in the last post. Those of us living now in wealthy, technological societies are unusually lucky. No other human era had access to as much information, not least to the results of sober and systematic studies of subjects in the hazy regions of the borderzone, reincarnation being one of these subjects. I’ve provided a brief summary on this blog to the studies of Ian Stevenson here. I won’t repeat what I said there but the post outlines what factual knowledge we possess of this claim—namely that people, or at least some people, had lived before.

Well-documented cases—to the extent that these cases can be documented at all—represent a fact difficult to explain away. They represent a “finding,” as it were, uncomfortable although it might be. Most westerners who say that they believe in reincarnation are expressing a feeling rather than a serious thought. It is reassuring in a way—in that death isn’t the be-all and the end-all here. But it isn’t really thought about or there might be a kind of pause. Reincarnation is not really a genuine continuity of any life left behind; the new life is not an expansion or enlargement of the last one—or, if it is, it isn’t a conscious one. The people who remember a previous life well enough for third parties to check the facts are very few in number. Most of us remember nothing—and the parsimonious explanation is that that’s because there is nothing to remember. In regions where reincarnation is part of religious belief, having been born again (but not in the Christian sense) is the mark of failure rather than a boon. We didn’t have what it takes to escape the wheel of karma.

Now reincarnation serves as a cosmological explanation in the Hindu world—as the Fall and its consequence, death, serves in ours. But there is an element of fact in each. Some people do remember having lived before, indeed insistently so. Fact. At the same time the troubles and tribulations of this life are experienced by all; and death is also certainly a fact. To this I would add Near Death Experience studies. Those elements of them telling of experience in another world, meeting a luminous being, relatives who’ve passed on, etc., cannot be objectively checked. But in the early stages of NDEs souls make observations about this world such that comatose individuals cannot possibly make, thus lending some weight by that to that which then follows. This body of information is also a fact.

The fiction—in my title—is the detailed elaboration accruing to these cosmological projections, as common in the East as in the West. It is produced by hypnotic regressions of living individuals who thus “recover” past lives. That literature isn’t even very good entertainment. The notions that bad karma can result in future lives as frogs or dogs or snakes belongs to the fictional category too. The West has produced its low level fiction of horrid devils torturing the wicked in fire with pitchforks—and the righteous harping on clouds. Both East and West have also produced grand and noble myths for which there is not even a shred of factual underpinning. But it is the fiction, largely, that underpins faith, as such.

The In-Between is where the thoughtful person finds himself—and in that zone we find all kind of markers but not a shred of certainty. Human consciousness and its upward potential are very hopeful markers—certainly for me. They point to the presence of meaning in the universe despite the incommensurable meaninglessness of the vastness of material reality. That there is more to reality than the unfathomable depths of burning stars—for that the few odd pockets of fact suffice. To make clear, sharp, conceptual sense of them is denied. A sensible approach, it seems to me, is to accept the visible facts and at least to think about underlying structures that might comprehensively explain all of human experience, not least reincarnation. It too appears to be an aspect of existence. But to assume that reincarnation is the universal fate of every person—that starts to feel like fiction.

To this I might add a third grouping of experiences—and the most puzzling of all. It is the ability sharply and in detail to dream the future. It suggests that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in our philosophy.

The Monstrous Restoration

In the context of yesterday’s post on a verse in Genesis, it is sometimes instructive to contemplate the vast process by means of which ancient writings have been raised to the rank of revelation and how orthodox doctrines are formed by a process that functions exactly like legislation—thus hammered out, voted in or voted out. How this observation fits the general thematic of the last few posts, the Fall of Man, will become plain as we proceed. The Genesis view is that the Fall was occasioned by sin and brought death as its consequence. (Paul: “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23). One of the very prominent early Christian theologians, Origen (c. 185-254), held a view that is at least mildly conformant to this doctrine, at the abstract level, anyway, if not in detail. Whenever the Church Fathers are mentioned, there you will find a mention of Origen—but invariably followed by the annotation that, well, technically, he was not a Church Father because he had heretical views. Of that in a moment.

Origen’s fascinating view was that souls pre-exist their incarnation, thus that they were created at the very beginnings of Reality. The very fact that we are material bodies was proof for Origen of the Fall, but the disobedience took place before such objects as bodies existed. You might say that humanity’s disobedience took place in a higher realm and that all those here were personally disobedient. The problems associated with “inherited” original sin therefore go away. The disobedience produced a degree of nonbeing in those who disobeyed, and a consequence of disobedience was, is, bodily existence. Origen, therefore, believed in reincarnation, metempsychosis. “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life,” Origen wrote. A source I found for that is here—on page 42 of the referenced book. Origen’s scholarly labor involved work in discerning the origins of the New Testament, thus he participated in the process that turns old writings into revelation. But some of his own theological ideas were later condemned as anathema by a legislative body, the Second Council of Constantinople, in 533. He thus exemplifies in person the processes by which doctrines evolve.

The Council declared the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” anathema and condemned those who believed in “the monstrous restoration which follows from it.” The use of those energetic adjectives pleases me—none of the usual bland-talk in the sixth century. The monstrous restoration, of course, is reincarnation. Well, perhaps it is monstrous—if seen from a much, much higher perch in the order of creation.

Two observations. First, it is interesting to note that a very broad hermeneutical interpretation of Genesis’ Chapter 3—viewed as a poetical take on a real state of affairs—could result in so enlarging the picture that Origen’s view becomes credible. Second, that view is widely held in Hinduism, not least the eternal nature of souls and the fact that their capture by Wheel of Karma is the consequence of desire for the low. In that context the death of someone who has become purified is, indeed, a blessing, devoutly to be wished.

East of Eden

Poetry holds something beyond conceptual thought—and by the last, of course, I mean the rigorous, the philosophical kind. The poet tries to capture something elusive. He or she has been inspired. The act is a kind of mirror-making. The mirror is made of images drawn from sensory, actual, day-to-day experience. What it suggests is the not-quite-graspable. But if poetry then also mythographic works like Genesis. Both are subject to hermeneutics; we contemplate them; we try to extract meanings implicit but not sharply visible in them. Some view hermeneutics negatively: dissect the apple, analyze it chemically. The knowledge never tells you how an apple tastes. But we engage in hermeneutics all the time—even if the word is unfamiliar. We’re always pondering the meaning of our own intuitions and experiences.

The hermeneutic task I set myself today is to examined Genesis 3:19, the last verse of what is known as “the curse on man and woman” after their disobedience. It is interpreted to mean that death first appears in human experience after the fall. Yes. That’s an interpretation. The verse says (Revised Standard):

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The verse certainly doesn’t say: “Although my original plan was that you should live forever, always young, I’m now introducing a change. Your body will decay and you will die. You came from matter and back to that state you shall go.”

But then verses 22-24 complicate matters. They are much more specific. Do they already represent a bit of hermeneutics that got included into the myth itself later? Here is the passage:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

A curious verse. Adam had not been forbidden to eat of the tree of life. But now, now that he had knowledge, it was time to prevent him? Such readings of the Torah, of course, suggested to Paul (in Romans, for instance) that death came with the fall—not because of knowledge so much but because the fruit of the tree of life was then also denied—by denial of access to it.

But no. I’m not talking tongue in cheek here. This is a myth, a poetic statement. The sensory images of trees, magic although they are, are symbols easy for ordinary minds to grasp and to imagine. They simplify through images. They suggest the gist of things. The distance between human and the divine is symbolized simply as the distance between the lord-owner of the rich estates and the poaching peasant who doesn’t know his place. Genesis 3 is not a problem for the poet. Two big intuitions are wrapped up in it and turned into a story without too careful a logical parsing. One is the wayward, willful, selfishness of man. Another is an explanation of our current condition. One is said to cause the other. No critical analysis of each verse was contemplated by the writers—or, indeed, undertaken by them—much less the isolation of single verses as if they were hard facts like gravity.

There is no hint here, not the faintest, that after his body returns to the dust Adam’s soul shall rise into the heavens there to be judged. Materialists might find great comfort in Genesis 3. Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return is rather, you might say, orthodox materialism. Isn’t it? But the poetry of humanity is not exhausted by reading Genesis. Genesis was one take on the subject. There are others. In some death may be viewed as a great blessing—rescuing the individual who, like Paul, in Romans 7:24, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

More Notes on The Fall

The story of the Fall commences roughly on the third page of Genesis; where it falls depends on print size. It is the very opener of the story. The story of Creation sketches in the setting, but the setting is not elaborated. We hear something more about Adam and Eve and how they came about, but nothing like a history of their lives in Paradise. The human events begin with the Fall. If this were not our own at least inherited myth—inherited by way of the decline of the last civilization and the myth’s acceptance by our own, in Christendom—but there promoted to the status of revealed truth—thus if we see it from the outside, objectively, it would be quite correct to surmise that it is a myth attempting to explain the mystery of human existence and suffering. At the same time, it recognizes our very high state in the order of nature, our transcending capacities—while also explaining the dark side, man’s war against himself and nature and, above all, the absolutely unavoidable—death.

We might also read the third chapter of Genesis as a head-shaking and despondent look back to another and ancient time. Tiny pockets of “paradise” have actually survived into ours: primitive hunting and gathering societies (e.g. Papua New Guinea, Amazon region, some island societies). The Fall in Genesis could thus also be read as a view of the transition between such primitive societies and the later agricultural dispensation, the last vastly more complex and riddled with conflict. The herding phase was an intermediate between the two here and there. That this surmise is also correct is evident. Agriculture is prominent in Genesis 3:17—and it is the new thing; it is part of the curse.

Now, of course, we tend to view the primitive as holy, the complex as riddled with evil. The higher the knowledge, the more complex the society always tends to be. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is thus—shifting to another culture—the opening of Pandora’s box. But sentimentality is clearly at work here. To know anything genuinely means to live it. The hunting and gathering life undoubtedly is also just—life. What characterizes it, when we find it, is ample resources and low levels of conflict; those two are obviously linked. That we find it is already a kind of fall—at least for the people who’ve been found. The next thing you know, they’ll be greedily wanting gas-engines for their boats. After that, kiss paradise good-bye.

When I ponder it, the paradisaical state is present all around us as the animal kingdom. It is primitive society—but without the presence of mind. It lives without our form of consciousness, without history, and without memory. Animals don’t consciously notice death taking others; no fear of it is present—as it it’s also absent in little children. Thus the ultimate Fall is the rise of consciousness as such—and secondarily those transformations in the environment that cause knowledge to increase and also to sharpen. Knowledge is only mildly present in the primitive, and always closely twinned with particulars; it is extraordinarily sharp (conceptual) in a vast, rich, and dying technological culture. Its level increases with every advance of civilization; conflicts multiply; and tools for giving it force become obscene, like atomic bombs.

Having said this much, the core issue sharpens. It is the stupefying observation that something sublime, like awareness, produces evil and the more it develops, the more its dark shadow grows. This is a real issue. Genesis attempts an explanation. The problem is disobedience. But Genesis’ explanation is paradoxical. The idea of obedience contains within it two crucial elements: freedom and knowledge. Adam and Eve knew something—before, as it were, they did. The knew about the Tree of Knowledge. They had been told about it. Something of the fruit of that tree had been given to them before Eve ever reached for that famous apple. The writers and editors of Genesis were people just like us—stupefied by the paradox of reality. And they, too, punted. The explanation must lie deeper than anything that we can now see from the shadows of this valley.

Blog posts should not grow into chapters. These comments will continue. I want to extract more from this, not least something more on death and its linkage to transcendence.

I Didn't Want To! Sin Made Me Do it!

One of the ways to discover how really old our dogmatic religions are is to ponder the curious concept of original sin. It’s root is in Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 5, Verse 12: “Well then, sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned” (Jerusalem Bible). That death “entered the world” is linked back to Genesis chapter 3, where the event of Adam and Eve’s disobedience is told, and where, in verse 19, we’re told that one consequence of it is “return to the soil.”

The curious aspect of this view is not the rather straightforward observation that people are capable of wickedness, but that one man brought all this about. Thus it is involuntary for Adam’s descendants, never mind the tortured justification of our voluntary participation in the original disobedience that the Catholic Encyclopedia uses, quoting and summarizing Augustine here (see subtitle “How voluntary.” The pertinent quote follows at the tail of this post). In Paul sin and death are linked. Later successive councils and theologians have dug a deep trench to separate the two; not Paul. Bodies die. Indeed, in the same letter to the Romans, 7:14-24, Paul manages to elaborate the linkage by blaming the body for sin; sin is in the body. Therefore “When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.”

There are some genuinely valuable insights in those verses in Chapter 7, not least a well-observed tension between at least two levels of consciousness that often tend to be in conflict. Worth reading; a link is here. Too bad that concepts like divine revelation have frozen this testimony and its interpretation—and the foregoing presentation of original sin—into a kind of untouchable fossil unquestioned acceptance of which has led to multiple dicta by church councils and countless theological explanations.

* * *

Here from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

It is this law of solidarity, admitted by common sentiment, which attributes to children a part of the shame resulting from the father's crime. It is not a personal crime, objected the Pelasgians. “No", answered St. Augustine, “but it is paternal crime” (Op. imperf., I, cxlviii). Being a distinct person I am not strictly responsible for the crime of another; the act is not mine. Yet, as a member of the human family, I am supposed to have acted with its head who represented it with regard to the conservation or the loss of grace. I am, therefore, responsible for my privation of grace, taking responsibility in the largest sense of the word. This, however, is enough to make the state of privation of grace in a certain degree voluntary, and, therefore, “without absurdity it may be said to be voluntary” (St. Augustine, “Retract.”, I, xiii).

As a member of the human family I am supposed to have acted with its head? Before being born? Without absurdity? Come again?

I’m not saying that something like “the Fall” didn’t take place; no; but that above is just one hypothesis.

The Moral and the Natural

Amazing cathedrals of thought are built up over questions to which the answers seem very simple to me. A discussion in the blogs I read now centers on a book the subject of which is the relationship of science to values. Tracing these things I discover, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ht), that there is something called meta-ethics, further that it has a component called non-naturalism, and that this something is described as “the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.” Now if that description is correct, and to me it seems self-evident, the relationship of science to values would appear to be pretty tenuous, pertaining to scientists, and how they act and live, not to the work they actually do. To give science itself a role in explaining morality would strike me as inviting my best hammer to read out loud to me. I reach this conclusion quite simply. In order to enable science to speak authoritatively on values, I would have to accept that the mind is produced by the brain and nothing else. Now that, of course, is a widely accepted notion—and assent to it is absolutely required to take seriously the notion that science has anything to say about values at all. Science can speak about facts—but values? First, good definitions. I cannot assent to the notion that values are facts.

Elusive Word: Love

I’ve been rereading an old Harper Torchbooks edition of Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God, nine lectures Buber gave at universities in 1951. The book appeared a year later and, as I’ve just discovered, is till available from Amazon but now from Humanity Books. The lectures centered on a critique of modern philosophies, most centrally on existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre) and Jungian psychology. These “eclipse” God in the sense of a person—and for Buber, most famed for his writing about the “I and Thou” relationship, always between persons, the eclipse really means turning a personal God into either “the God of the philosophers” (Pascal’s phrase), thus into a transcending idea, or into a human self, namely one’s own, a word that Jung liked to render always with a leading cap. The central essay in this book is titled “The Love of God and the Idea of Deity”—a very revealing lecture in that it attempts give some reality to the nature of the love that humanity can feel for God.

Back in the 1950s—and my scribbled comments are still there in the margin—I had already learned to shake my head at the self-centered and the abstract treatments of the subject. The elevation of the self, individuated or not, into a kind of private deity never agreed with me, seeming to be a kind of cul de sac. At the same time, an abstraction cannot love or be loved. For this reason Deuteronomy 6:5, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” either lacks all meaning in any real human context—or I was missing some hidden meaning in the word love itself.

In Buber’s personalistic thought it is the presence of God, always and everywhere, that is an underlying intuitive foundation of the sort of love Deuteronomy points to—very poorly. Buber says that the actual words in Exodus 3:14, usually translated as “I am that I am” actually are “I shall be there”—therefore presence. “I am with you always,” as in Matthew 28:20. “There is no spot where God is not” is a favorite phrase of ours here—and has the same totally personalistic connotation, intentionality, and aura that the I-Thou relationship holds in Buber’s thought. Those we love are always present to us—no matter how many miles may separate us. This feeling is a matter of experience.

There is a Sufi story about a master who gave each of his disciples a live pigeon and told them to wring its neck somewhere where nobody could see the act. All the disciples, except one, came back with dead pigeons. One came back with the pigeon still alive. Asked why he had failed, the disciple said: “There is no place where God can’t see me.”

Contrast this sort of thing with the usually abstract discussions of God—and gradually the notion of what loving God might actually mean emerges, however faintly. Love is the most elusive of words. Yes, we do know its manifestations at the sensory levels—but it is as we leave that level behind that it becomes oddly translucent so that, eventually, even the love of God becomes gradually accessible. But, Lord, it’s a steep mountain—and the simple commands of Just Do It, and with all your heart and soul and might, is not a ski-lift.