The Persistence of Religions, Post # 5

How can we explain the strange persistence of religions given that the sciences have eroded most of their explanatory powers and nation states have gradually replaced much of their former power to provide order and social structure?

In earlier posts here we noted the ability of the Homeric religion to explain what happens in the hidden interiors of plants, animals, and humans using myths of deities and an assortment of minor divinities.  We also mentioned the importance of Roman Christianity in supporting imperial might and structural order. We have to admit that the rise of modern science, state religions, and multiple independent nations have vanquished the importance of centralized Christianity and damaged its explanatory authority.

In post # 4, we observed the shift of religious focus and definition among the Enthusiasts, Kierkegaard, and Rudolph Otto to an emphasis on extraordinary emotions, whether comforting or terrifying and awe-inspiring. I then wondered how any religion centered on a patriarchal sky god in a cosmos centered on man, the earth, or even the sun could possibly come to terms with the violent, immense, exploding universe we have recently discovered using the cosmos-splitting Hubble telescope.  It is surprising that an evangelical president like George W. Bush did not order the Hubble program squashed the way he did stem-cell research.  The Hubble universe has room for many extraordinary things, but an omnipotent anthropomorphic male deity in charge is probably not one them.  The Hubble sky is not a realm in which we can seek much human reassurance.  No sky god in that cosmos would have much time or energy to waste on this insignificant planet or its human inhabitants.  It would be just as grandiose for us to think otherwise as it was for anyone in the age of Galileo and Copernicus to cling to visions of a geocentric universe.

Yet religions persist.  One may wonder why.

In my forthcoming novel, Mysterious Days, a writer of murder mysteries, Milt Walters, stands beyond an absurdly but magnificently arrayed female statue in an all but abandoned cathedral in the French Pyrenees and stares at her dark face and the dark child before her. He reads an account of how this statue was discovered by a local plowman centuries before when his plowshare struck it.  The plowman took it to his hut for the night, but when he woke it was gone.  He went back to where he'd found it, and there it was again. Walters ponders the figure before:   "Milt knew the story he was reading did not explicitly account for her most salient characteristic, the color of her skin. For him as for others in past centuries, the dark Madonna had taken on ever deeper meanings, ones he hesitated even now to share with this daughter. In his reflections, she was more of the earth than the blue sky, more of the red flesh than the bodiless spirit, more in the realm of the feminine than the blue Madonna, who belonged to the father’s sky. The dark Madonna always seemed more completely human in her sexual being than the divine mother who for centuries had caused humans to long for the inhuman sky—for the transcendent state realized in death. ... The pair represented no ordinary Madonna and child. It showed in her serene face, free of the terrible split between the sky and the earth, and in her extraordinary complexion. Her color did not derive from pale clouds but from the olive hue of earth, bark, and countless fruits and nuts. She had to be the dark Madonna he had pursued for decades . . .."  


As Mysterious Days points out, "The Black Madonna is found in over a hundred churches in France and in several hundred more around the globe."  Again one has to ask why.  Walters, who himself creates fictions, realizes that the legendary history of the Black Madonna is probably another fiction and has absolutely no "authority" nor makes any claim to impose either social or spiritual structures of order.  In itself, it lacks explanatory powers.  In fact, it asks more questions than it answers, questions that you as a reader of this blog might want to address before I explore them from Walter's point of view in the next posting.  I hope you will.

The Sense of Divinity, Post # 4

Thomas in his comment on Post # 3, NPPT, said he was waiting for discussions of the divine and the comfort it provides..  In my response I wrote that in as much as all the posts here have dealt with deities, each has addressed forms of the divine in the ways each deity offers its believers comfort.  Here I wish to elaborate on this notion that NPPT  widens the net of divinity to include more comforts than we might expect as members of western culture.  For Homer, his deities, as we discussed them, furnished the comfort of  'science' in as much as they were used to explain what is going on in the realms of nature and human nature.  Other religions the posts have covered, from Hinduism through Greek, Jewish, and Islamic religions, provided comforts in the ways suggested earlier.

Even within the dominant western faith, Christianity, the sense or feeling of the Divine has varied greatly. Roman Christianity may have begun among poor or enslaved people in the catacombs but Emperor Constantine recast it as an imperial religion that combined political power with hierarchies of social authority and order.  To reconcile contradictions in Christianity between the comfort the downtrodden had found in Jesus and what Constantine sensed as the power of its god, the Nicaea council of 325 AD fell back on the practices of older religions when it restored a variation of poly-theism by establishing a trinity of deities: a powerful father figure, a gentle son, and a spirit.  It is also possible to consider the three as 'avatars' of a single deity, much the way Hindus viewed the transcendental Brahma and the incarnated Atman as one being..

Reformers of the 16th century, including Luther, Calvin, even Henry VIII of England, broke with the Roman church's structures of central authority and created other views of the divine that included a more immediate access for individuals to a transcendent deity.

In 18th century England, the Enthusiasts (who would become the Methodists) sensed they were 'en-thused', that is, inspired or possessed by divinity, the very presence of a god, and they expressed this comforting feeling with exuberant energy and joy.

From a less sanguine perspective, Kierkegaard, in 1843, wrote of the divine sense as the Fear and Trembling, the anxiety, that Abraham must have felt when commanded by his god to sacrifice his only son, beloved Isaac.  A similar awfulness figures in the numinous Idea of the Holy that Rudolph Otto put forth in 1917.  For Otto, the numinous quality of the holy combined a demonic terrifying power with the fascinating total otherness of the deity. As with Homer, the divinity provided a type of mysterious intuition of the noumenon, "an unknowable reality underlying all" phenomena.  

In 1930, when Freud tried to describe the "true source of religious feeling," he spoke first of "a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded---as it were 'oceanic'."  He dismisses this mother-like sensation as a "purely subjective fact," then goes on to locate the true source in a "feeling of infantile helplessness" that leads to a "longing for the father" and the "need for a father's protection."  Drawing on this need for the patriarchal, Freud elaborates a convincing discussion of the conscience, the superego, as the cause of the Discontent we experience as we become adults adjusted to the demands of our Civilization.

In the 21st century, as we stare through the Hubble telescope at where it all came from, it is difficult to connect the Enthusiasts' union with the divine, Abraham's cozy relationship with his god, or even Freud's cosmic family romance to the remnants we see hurdling towards us from the source, the Big Bang.  We ponder Orion's Belt until it is no longer a cluster of stars but a great womb of bright galaxies spewed out into the darkness of space and time.  All the anthropomorphic notions of the caring divine seem to fall away as we stare into the mighty and violent universe in which stars--no, whole galaxies--are created and blown apart before our eyes.  Granted that there are black holes in the sky; there must also be 'white holes' like Orion's Belt from which what has been sucked into the vortex erupts forth recreated in new colors and forms of astounding size.

To acknowledge this awful power can become a tremendously humbling experience, one closer to the feelings described by Kierkegaard and Otto than the family feeling that connects us to any of the anthropomorphic sky deities.  Once humbled thus, we may accept the process the way Lao-tzu in the 6th century BC accepted the Tao as the Way of things, the energy that is like a well, "older than God," that is "used but never used up."  Or, to bring that comfort closer to home, we may embrace it the way Dylan Thomas did, as "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower."

It is in domesticating this continuous power once again that we arrive at the French Grail and the Dark Virgin that figure in the forthcoming novels, Deepest France & Mysterious Days..

NPPT, Neo-psychopolytheism: Source and Uses: Post # 3

Sula Anne has asked for more information about NPPT.

The term came to me after publishing my first book, when I was asked to fill out a biographical form for a serial dictionary or encyclopedia of America authors.  I had just answered the political affiliation question with a label I lifted from The Education of Henry Adams.  As I recall, Adams said he was a Radical-Conservative, which to my 1970s ears sounded like an oxymoron affirming the man's open-minded pragmatism. 

Next came the survey's religious affilation question.  Having grown up in one protestant denomination and married in a second before next trying out Unitarianism and the Ethical Humanism (is there any other kind?), I wanted a label, since some label was required, that might seem as playful and thoughtful as Adams's political one.  Much the way Adams thought psychology might one day frame politics, I sensed psychology could provide similar assistance in comprehending religions.  I figured that "psycho" might add a descriptive but lighter touch to the polymorphic thing that the world's religions became when seen from an open-minded point of view.  The term came from this light-hearted source.

NPPT morphed from this beginning into a very personal concept that slowly became more and more useful to me.  I learned from E. R. Dodds that psychology offered great help in understanding the functions of the Homeric religion in all the Greek texts I taught.  In fact, for Homer, I gradually realized that the myths were not only the psychology of The Iliad, but also its zoology, botany, and physics.  In short, the myths constituted the science of the 8th century BC.  They provided hypotheses about the motivations of the characters and about the causes of events occurring in the hidden interior of plants, animals, planets, stars, the sun itself. 

Whether 'Homer' viewed these explanations as useful hypotheses or as 'truth' is a difficult debate to settle.  By the time that the Greek mind produced Aeschylus, however, we note that Orestes sees the Furies (the conscience figures) before anyone else can see them.  In short, they are psychological forces before they become dramatically useful personifications visible to other characters and the audience of The Oresteian Trilogy. 

Even more convincing evidence that two of the three great Greek tragedians were early psycho-polytheists comes from Euripides's last and most powerful play, The Bacchae.  In college, we learned that Euripides was the least theistic of the trinity of tragedians.  Even so, his final play employs the god Dionysos to explain why a group of women who do not believe in him can be hypnotized for (or by) their unbelief into crazy dancing, dangerous snake-handling, and ultimately into ripping King Pentheus into pieces.  As a dramatist, Euripides was not only obliged to show respect for the god of tragedy but to recognize the supra-human power of repressed emotions that can grow strong enough to drive people to criminally insane acts.  And, in Dionysos' case, the same god is able to transport those who accept his clearly trans-human powers into an ecstatic joy.  In other words, Euripides 2500 years ago pre-figured and portrayed Freud's notion of repression by using religious figures rather than imagery Freud would borrow from 19th century hydraulic science.  After Euripides, Plato replaced Zeus with the abstraction, Logos, and the deities with archetypes, thus preparing the way for a Greek-educated Paul/Saul and a Greek-using John. 

To apply NPPT to another religious system, Hinduism, I use the essential part of NPPT, its sympathetic imagination (a term applied to Shakespeare), its empathetic vicarious-introspection (Heinz Kohut's term), each time I visit the upper floor of the Asian Art Museum on Larkin street in San Francisco.  There I take photos of the deities with animal attributes, especially the elephant-headed god of good fortune and wisdom, Ganesha, and of his parents, strong Shiva and voluptuous Parvati.  Those Hindus who showed respect for these three were, I speculate, appreciative of the agricultural world around them in which elephants, the iron oxen, and other animals played a vital role.  They must also have been at ease with their bodies, as providers of pleasures and children, to acknowledge the sexuality of the parent deities with such openly erotic art.  From the Hindu rooms I wander back and forth to art devoted to Buddha who with the Eightfold Path directs his followers to destroy the desire that causes sorrow that is life.  I sense that India must have fallen on very difficult times to have embraced a transcending perspective built on such rejection.  I also note that this evolution from many deities parallels the centralizing of control we earlier noted in the West's later movement from polytheism's diversity to an order-focused monotheism. 

Of course there is much more to Hinduism and Buddhism than the empathetic approach of NPPT has uncovered.  But the elements revealed go beyond doctrinal differences that produce true/false, good/evil arguments.  NPPT attempts to put us in the emotions and minds of the believers and understand why they might feel the way they do about major elements of their faiths.

NPPT's imaginative sympathy also prepares us to understand why legends as far from the mainstream as the French Grail, the Black Madonna, Black Sarah, the French career of Mary Magdalena and her daughter could have enough emotional importance to underlie a variety of contemporary books, including Deepest France & Mysterious Days, two eccentric mysteries I plan to publish in next few months.  It also explains why someone educated in the western intellectual and literary traditions, especially American and contemporary fiction plus Darwin, Freud, Sartre, Jung, and Kohut would want to write these non-orthodox novels. 

So, thank you, Sula Anne for asking your question.