You might say that life is not predominantly—or even superficially—a logical endeavor. Life transcends logic, and therefore religion does too. At the practical level logic does its manual labor, but the higher reaches are intuitive. Christianity illustrates this. It is the only monotheistic religion which features a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Belief in these three persons, who are yet a single God, is the mark of all those who subscribe to the Apostles’ Creed. The scriptural roots of this appear in Matthew 28:16-20, the concluding verses of that gospel. The resurrected Jesus appears to his followers on a mountain in Galilee. There Jesus said to them: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” This verse is then formulated, in or around 390 AD into the Apostles’ Creed. In the Latin version, the Son is conceived of the Holy Spirit (conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto)—and since the conception is actually experienced by the Virgin Mary, the obvious reading is that God is most definitely masculine. How else can we read this?
But religions are intuitive structures. Not surprisingly, therefore—and almost by way of a kind of Law of Compensation—the Our Lady becomes a very major symbolical figure, at least in Catholicism. Her statues and images are everywhere—and rare the office of Jesuit professors I used to visit in college where a prominent painting or statue of Mary was not the distinctive art in those offices. Indeed I remember reading, with approval of course, Robert Graves opining that the enduring quality of Catholicism as a religion, and (he might have added) its continuing strong attraction of converts everywhere, is due to a cultural correction introduced into the extraordinarily masculine theology by popular intuition. Once you open up that indivisible number, One, and thus (however explained, however theologized away) multiple persons appear—which, of course, happens in every religion sooner or later, if the real essence of it is strong—the numbers will multiply and the Feminine will make its appearance.
Catholicism makes a kind of conceptual but in practice meaningless distinction between veneration and worship. It is permissible to venerate the Virgin Mary but not to worship her. Doing that would be Mariolatry (rhymes with idolatry), a word of Protestant coinage dating to the eighteenth century.
Religions have a life of their own—and the cultural realities of it have more weight than the theological skeletons that are largely always out of sight. Thus also Buddhism evolved from a kind of very focused, ascetic elite pursuit into the Mahayana, with far more members than any other of its endlessly growing strands. But women in Buddhism are still written in very small letters. How many people know, for example, that the Buddha had been married? Or what Mrs. Gautama’s name had been? Well, for the record, she was the Princess Yahodharā. And she and the Buddha had had a boy called Rāhula. Learn something new every day.
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Monday, October 31, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Apocalypticism
End-times are a favorite subject of mine, albeit in the much more limited sense of cyclic history—thus the end of civilizations. Thus I thought I’d look things up. Come to think of it, the two subjects are closely linked, certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Apocalypse (meaning the Book of Revelation) appeared in a time when the Graeco-Roman civilization was entering its end-stages. The date of the book is unknown but falls somewhere between the first and second centuries of our era. In rough terms, I would say, the Roman civilization fell apart between 44 BC, with Caesar, and 305 AD, when Diocletian’s reign ended. He was the one who formally split the empire. In times like that, above all, sensitive souls intuit that something is wrong. All manner of Gnosticisms rise; in our case, for instance, in the form of existentialism. Sophistication and book-learning are wide-spread. People read—and they do so because others write. Our peculiar version of that is that everybody writes—but nobody reads…
Imposing some sort of structure onto the maddeningly structure-less nature of sheer, brute Duration must be at least one reason why apocalypticism is a perennial fruit of human civilization. It becomes acute in hard times—and attracts particularly the elderly. The latter have actual cause for having end-time feelings. These begin to rise geometrically as we pass 75—and what I feel must be the very law of the universe. Mustn’t it? Let the wicked finally be punished; and let me be saved from the turmoil of the end-times.
I note that the Encyclopedia Britannica, at least my 1956 version, restricts the subject to Christian speculation, but Wikipedia, the now encyclopedia, avoid the word itself and substitutes “End of the World” instead. And it embraces a wider cultural interpretation. We learn there that apocalypticism has the same structure all around the world. There is a definite, precise, calculable end—take that, insufferable Duration. Evil, very often personified, is finally defeated. And the blessings of timelessness are always brought to us by a divine or divine-like grand benevolent figure.
I like the Hindu version of apocalypticism best of all. Plenty of time to see if the strawberries we planted, and I enclosed in a protective mesh against the rabbits yesterday, will actually eventually, with a little help from Duration, end up in a bowl with my breakfast.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Three Ways of Seeing
If I take the very big view of humanity’s systems of belief, they divide into three categories—and roughly along geographical lines. In the west prophetic religions and materialism form two of the camps. That fact at once suggests that the debate about God’s existence is essentially a western preoccupation; the reasons for that will become clearer as I go on. Asian cultures see reality as a—well, let me call it a dispensation. Using that word I mean “a broad acceptance that reality arises from a transcending source”—but in a different way than we picture that process in the prophetic religions. In China it is Heaven or the Way (Tao); in India it is Brahman, the Ultimate; the cosmic law experienced by humanity is karma.
The chief difference between these systems is how close or distant their adherents imagine themselves to be from the Ultimate Power—and whether or not this power has anything like a coherent self and consciousness. Some scholars in the west are so influenced by their experience of or familiarity with prophetic religions (in which God is most definitely a person) that they hesitate to call Asian faiths religions at all or add words like “philosophical” to modify the world “religion”; some simply call Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, and Hinduism “philosophies.” Western religions, by contrast, are “revealed” religions; that very word signals the personal qualities of God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
In materialism, ancient and modern, no conscious presence exists behind the cosmic whole. The cosmos is assumed to have a lawful behavior, conceived either as innate in matter and/or arising from random motion. In Lucretius, for instance, atoms, the only real existents, move uniformly; but from time to time, arbitrarily and unpredictably, their movement changes by means of a “swirl.” This motion is the source of all change and also of freedom as experienced by humanity. Consciousness here comes from very subtle atoms—and they also “swirl.” The most severe version of modern materialism in effect recognizes only the law of statistics. What we ordinarily call the laws of nature are, in this view, only movements that recur with a very high probability. In this, the materialistic view, the Ultimate is simply atoms or particles or waves—alone or in some kind of combination. Consciousness, personality, selves (and so forth) are invariably but temporarily emergent properties that disappear again as soon as the arrangement that gave rise to them change.
Now to the Asian traditions. In these the functioning of divinity (or simply of the transcending) is also experienced as law, but consciousness within or behind the cosmos (or both) is accepted but not emphasized. And this for a reason: the cosmos is a dispensation, not a perceivably intentional project the object of which is humanity. Heaven’s actions manifest through the world; they are observable in the world’s very arrangements. Human violation of the dispensation is corrected by the very workings of karma, by the Tao, or by the mandate of Heaven—and we discover these outcomes by experiencing them—whether here or in the realms beyond. We know the law by observation, not by revelation—and it works infallibly whether we observe it or not. In outer forms these religions are similar to the Western prophetic religions—not so in their inwardness. Hinduism, for example, has its own trinity, arising from Brahman, the unknowable ultimate. The three are Brahma (notice the difference in spelling) the creator, Vishnu the maintainer, and Shiva the destroyer. In China Heaven is conceived as the ultimate agent, but subsidiary powers are admitted as well. The difference lies in the fact that the observable cosmos as a whole is the message or contains it. There is no specific communication, beyond or within the cosmos itself and specifically directed at humans. Indeed in this form of religion human beings, narrowly considered, are viewed as a spark of divinity. That conception explains human powers and also translates into human responsibility to discern the law and to apply it to specific circumstances—or suffer consequences.
The third way of seeing reality takes the form of revealed or prophetic religions. All three arose from Judaism. The unique character of this view lies in the manner in which the Ultimate communicates with humanity. The form of that communication is between God and selected individuals—who, in turn, then communicate with everybody else. Thus we have a succession of prophets. Alongside the ordinary laws of nature and the inner intuitions every person has, these religions project a special communication to humanity by an indirect method (God to prophet, prophet to public) as I’ve indicated. In Christianity, finally, one person of God—who is in that faith pictured as having three persons—actually becomes a human. Thus in revealed religion we also have a dispensation, which can be read by people, and a special law directed at humans through humans.
This brief encapsulation should make it obvious why it is that faith is such an important concept in the revealed religions—and why it is that atheism is not really an issue in the Asian cultures. Both materialism and dispensationalism (if I might so characterize the Asian systems of belief) leave decisions to the individual and rely for their authority entirely on human diligence in observation—and individual interpretation of the same. You don’t believe that Heaven has its way and cannot be opposed? That’s up to you. The prophetic religions, by contrast, demand assent to the idea that God would communicate specifically and in various contexts with individual humans and, by that method, provide yet another and higher law than is discernible by direct and personal experience.
The chief difference between these systems is how close or distant their adherents imagine themselves to be from the Ultimate Power—and whether or not this power has anything like a coherent self and consciousness. Some scholars in the west are so influenced by their experience of or familiarity with prophetic religions (in which God is most definitely a person) that they hesitate to call Asian faiths religions at all or add words like “philosophical” to modify the world “religion”; some simply call Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, and Hinduism “philosophies.” Western religions, by contrast, are “revealed” religions; that very word signals the personal qualities of God as understood in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
In materialism, ancient and modern, no conscious presence exists behind the cosmic whole. The cosmos is assumed to have a lawful behavior, conceived either as innate in matter and/or arising from random motion. In Lucretius, for instance, atoms, the only real existents, move uniformly; but from time to time, arbitrarily and unpredictably, their movement changes by means of a “swirl.” This motion is the source of all change and also of freedom as experienced by humanity. Consciousness here comes from very subtle atoms—and they also “swirl.” The most severe version of modern materialism in effect recognizes only the law of statistics. What we ordinarily call the laws of nature are, in this view, only movements that recur with a very high probability. In this, the materialistic view, the Ultimate is simply atoms or particles or waves—alone or in some kind of combination. Consciousness, personality, selves (and so forth) are invariably but temporarily emergent properties that disappear again as soon as the arrangement that gave rise to them change.
Now to the Asian traditions. In these the functioning of divinity (or simply of the transcending) is also experienced as law, but consciousness within or behind the cosmos (or both) is accepted but not emphasized. And this for a reason: the cosmos is a dispensation, not a perceivably intentional project the object of which is humanity. Heaven’s actions manifest through the world; they are observable in the world’s very arrangements. Human violation of the dispensation is corrected by the very workings of karma, by the Tao, or by the mandate of Heaven—and we discover these outcomes by experiencing them—whether here or in the realms beyond. We know the law by observation, not by revelation—and it works infallibly whether we observe it or not. In outer forms these religions are similar to the Western prophetic religions—not so in their inwardness. Hinduism, for example, has its own trinity, arising from Brahman, the unknowable ultimate. The three are Brahma (notice the difference in spelling) the creator, Vishnu the maintainer, and Shiva the destroyer. In China Heaven is conceived as the ultimate agent, but subsidiary powers are admitted as well. The difference lies in the fact that the observable cosmos as a whole is the message or contains it. There is no specific communication, beyond or within the cosmos itself and specifically directed at humans. Indeed in this form of religion human beings, narrowly considered, are viewed as a spark of divinity. That conception explains human powers and also translates into human responsibility to discern the law and to apply it to specific circumstances—or suffer consequences.
The third way of seeing reality takes the form of revealed or prophetic religions. All three arose from Judaism. The unique character of this view lies in the manner in which the Ultimate communicates with humanity. The form of that communication is between God and selected individuals—who, in turn, then communicate with everybody else. Thus we have a succession of prophets. Alongside the ordinary laws of nature and the inner intuitions every person has, these religions project a special communication to humanity by an indirect method (God to prophet, prophet to public) as I’ve indicated. In Christianity, finally, one person of God—who is in that faith pictured as having three persons—actually becomes a human. Thus in revealed religion we also have a dispensation, which can be read by people, and a special law directed at humans through humans.
This brief encapsulation should make it obvious why it is that faith is such an important concept in the revealed religions—and why it is that atheism is not really an issue in the Asian cultures. Both materialism and dispensationalism (if I might so characterize the Asian systems of belief) leave decisions to the individual and rely for their authority entirely on human diligence in observation—and individual interpretation of the same. You don’t believe that Heaven has its way and cannot be opposed? That’s up to you. The prophetic religions, by contrast, demand assent to the idea that God would communicate specifically and in various contexts with individual humans and, by that method, provide yet another and higher law than is discernible by direct and personal experience.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Explosive Words
I’m struck by the interesting relationship between the Western concept of “the church militant” and the Islamic concept of “jihad.” Both have positive meanings if viewed from within the faith system in which they arose but may be viewed negatively from the other—provided that the individual or group doing the viewing is moved by ignorance and ill will. From the Islamic point of view that “militancy” is the violent crusading spirit which brought war and mayhem to the Islamic world intermittently during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. (This comes to mind because I just finished reading one of Ellis Peter’s Cadfael novels.) From the Western point of view, jihad is terrorism.
Concepts can be as dangerous as high explosives. There is no escaping our mixed state in this dimension. Religious structures that came into being to raise humanity to a higher level themselves function in a chaotic environment, are themselves subject to decay, and are often captured by the very forces of ignorance that they would enlighten. Furthermore, they’re never finished and need the continuous effort of every generation even to function badly. Indeed those two expressions incorporate the very meaning of this struggle and its great difficulty. The last thing those on either side who formulated these expressions had in mind was the slaughter of the other.
Concepts can be as dangerous as high explosives. There is no escaping our mixed state in this dimension. Religious structures that came into being to raise humanity to a higher level themselves function in a chaotic environment, are themselves subject to decay, and are often captured by the very forces of ignorance that they would enlighten. Furthermore, they’re never finished and need the continuous effort of every generation even to function badly. Indeed those two expressions incorporate the very meaning of this struggle and its great difficulty. The last thing those on either side who formulated these expressions had in mind was the slaughter of the other.
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Song of the Pearl - I
The world’s mythologies seem to agree that humanity once lived in a perfect world: Paradise. The names we use are unimportant if they mean the same thing. So what happened? We find two explanations. One is that humanity sinned; as punishment we were expelled from Paradise into a harsher world. The other is that humanity was tempted to realize special pleasures or powers it hoped to gain in a realm it couldn’t see; once we descended into that lower realm, we got caught and entangled. In essence the two stories are the same. To sin is to want and grasp a lesser good. Both in the Christian and in the Hindu models, the same motives have the same consequence. Welcome to the Vale of Tears in one case, Welcome to the Wheel of Karma in the other. Notice that in both cases a vast community is involved. We see this most clearly in the Christian doctrine in which the guilt of the original couple clings to all of their descendants. The only rational way to see this is to assume that Adam and Eve stand for humanity as a whole. And let’s not get excessively rational. These are myths and we must understand them at the poetic level. Debates about sin clinging to DNA, for instance, are out of place; they’re not poetry but quibbling. Notice also that in both cases the lower state is due to individual decision; descent or exile is chosen by a free act of the will.
There are, however, two other myths on offer. Today they are minority views—and the views of very small minorities at that. One is the Mazdean (Zoroastrian) belief according to which we are here because we volunteered to take part in an act of creation. God willing I’ll get to that one in another post. The other is that we were sent in order to develop, rendered in the terminology of obtaining a great prize. In both of these myths we are innocent as we set out. In the other two models we are already guilty on arrival, even as “innocent” babes. In all of these models—whether innocent or guilty as we come—we can fail in our mission and, if we do, we remain in the realm of darkness. That realm of darkness is defined in different ways: in Christianity it is hell, in Hinduism and Gnosticism it is another life, in Mazdaism it is life with the dark force that represents one polarity of existence. Here I want to give a sketch of the last, the developmental model.
That model is succinctly rendered as the Song of the Pearl, sometimes as the Hymn of the Soul, found in one of the apocryphal books of the New Testament, The Acts of Thomas, embedded in that book but dating from an earlier time. You can read that song here. To reach the actual text, search for “108”; that search will put you at its beginning within the book. The song is quite short and easily read and there is the benefit of getting the information at first hand. But I will summarize it.
The story concern the son of a king who, in early youth, is sent from the “East” [read Paradise] down to Egypt in order to fetch a great prize, a pearl held by a devouring serpent. The child is stripped of its ceremonial garment and clothed in a yellow garb, provisioned and sent down. The child is guided at first but, at the borders with Egypt [read our world] he is left to himself. He remains conscious of his past until he partakes of the local food; it causes him to forget his real status (son of a king) and his glorious past home. He falls into a deep sleep from which he awakens only when at last a special letter, aimed at awakening him again, reaches him. This then causes him to remember why he came to Egypt and what he had to do. He proceeds to obtain the pearl by charming the serpent into sleep, obtains the pearl, and begins the trip home. Arriving there he strips off the filthy garment he had worn in Egypt [his body] and puts on the bejeweled garment of his native land [the spiritual body]. In due time he presents the pearl to the king.
The Song of the Pearl is usually classified as a Gnostic myth, but one finds it in various forms in Sufic and other traditions as well. Having reached us in the Acts of Thomas, it was obviously also valued by the early Christians.
Let me now add three personal reactions to this tale—and to models of development in general. These are summary in nature. I’ll use a future post to look at the myth in some detail. It takes more space than I have here.
First, let me strip away the mythical form and simply assume that a soul-community, an “order of the soul,” has discovered that life in the harsh confines of the material order is capable of educating souls—meaning to “draw out,” to realize hidden potentials. If we take that to be a plausible concept, namely that souls can be educated and improved, and that certain environments and experiences can further that development, the model starts sounding reasonable. But that model only becomes acceptable if we further assume that the majority of souls on earth will benefit, will gain something real from the process. This is not difficult to accept. The vast majority of people are decent—they live, struggle, and pass on. The degrees of improvement would vary, as they do in all models of education; and some few would fail.
Second, I would point out that near-death experience reports tend to confirm this model. They do not confirm all models in the same way. In many NDEs, the individual, wishing to go on and to realize the obviously superior values available on that side of the Borderzone are told that they must return; their time has not yet come; they have things still to accomplish. Some individuals also know this and return on their own accord, not because they’re urged.
Third, this model features a good deal of interaction between this realm and the higher one, the “East.” The soul is sent from there with appropriate provisions. It is guided on the way down, it is assisted while down here (although I’ve omitted that from my summary), it receives an enlightening “letter” from above. My own experience and observation is that communications, of sorts, do reach us here in various forms, most notably but not solely by means of intuitions and inspired revelations.
More on this in future posts.
There are, however, two other myths on offer. Today they are minority views—and the views of very small minorities at that. One is the Mazdean (Zoroastrian) belief according to which we are here because we volunteered to take part in an act of creation. God willing I’ll get to that one in another post. The other is that we were sent in order to develop, rendered in the terminology of obtaining a great prize. In both of these myths we are innocent as we set out. In the other two models we are already guilty on arrival, even as “innocent” babes. In all of these models—whether innocent or guilty as we come—we can fail in our mission and, if we do, we remain in the realm of darkness. That realm of darkness is defined in different ways: in Christianity it is hell, in Hinduism and Gnosticism it is another life, in Mazdaism it is life with the dark force that represents one polarity of existence. Here I want to give a sketch of the last, the developmental model.
That model is succinctly rendered as the Song of the Pearl, sometimes as the Hymn of the Soul, found in one of the apocryphal books of the New Testament, The Acts of Thomas, embedded in that book but dating from an earlier time. You can read that song here. To reach the actual text, search for “108”; that search will put you at its beginning within the book. The song is quite short and easily read and there is the benefit of getting the information at first hand. But I will summarize it.
The story concern the son of a king who, in early youth, is sent from the “East” [read Paradise] down to Egypt in order to fetch a great prize, a pearl held by a devouring serpent. The child is stripped of its ceremonial garment and clothed in a yellow garb, provisioned and sent down. The child is guided at first but, at the borders with Egypt [read our world] he is left to himself. He remains conscious of his past until he partakes of the local food; it causes him to forget his real status (son of a king) and his glorious past home. He falls into a deep sleep from which he awakens only when at last a special letter, aimed at awakening him again, reaches him. This then causes him to remember why he came to Egypt and what he had to do. He proceeds to obtain the pearl by charming the serpent into sleep, obtains the pearl, and begins the trip home. Arriving there he strips off the filthy garment he had worn in Egypt [his body] and puts on the bejeweled garment of his native land [the spiritual body]. In due time he presents the pearl to the king.
The Song of the Pearl is usually classified as a Gnostic myth, but one finds it in various forms in Sufic and other traditions as well. Having reached us in the Acts of Thomas, it was obviously also valued by the early Christians.
Let me now add three personal reactions to this tale—and to models of development in general. These are summary in nature. I’ll use a future post to look at the myth in some detail. It takes more space than I have here.
First, let me strip away the mythical form and simply assume that a soul-community, an “order of the soul,” has discovered that life in the harsh confines of the material order is capable of educating souls—meaning to “draw out,” to realize hidden potentials. If we take that to be a plausible concept, namely that souls can be educated and improved, and that certain environments and experiences can further that development, the model starts sounding reasonable. But that model only becomes acceptable if we further assume that the majority of souls on earth will benefit, will gain something real from the process. This is not difficult to accept. The vast majority of people are decent—they live, struggle, and pass on. The degrees of improvement would vary, as they do in all models of education; and some few would fail.
Second, I would point out that near-death experience reports tend to confirm this model. They do not confirm all models in the same way. In many NDEs, the individual, wishing to go on and to realize the obviously superior values available on that side of the Borderzone are told that they must return; their time has not yet come; they have things still to accomplish. Some individuals also know this and return on their own accord, not because they’re urged.
Third, this model features a good deal of interaction between this realm and the higher one, the “East.” The soul is sent from there with appropriate provisions. It is guided on the way down, it is assisted while down here (although I’ve omitted that from my summary), it receives an enlightening “letter” from above. My own experience and observation is that communications, of sorts, do reach us here in various forms, most notably but not solely by means of intuitions and inspired revelations.
More on this in future posts.
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