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.
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