New Thoughts about the NPPT Approach: Post #8

Reconsidering the postings in this blog, I think I can now add some depth to the origins of the Neo-psychopolytheistic approach to religious matters. Perhaps these reflections can also help us move beyond the too frequent religious conflicts and wars.

Earlier I said, truthfully, that the NPPT label first came to me from Henry Adams's calling himself a Radical-Conservative in politics. In the seventies, I believed that Adams was playfully attempting to avoid being pigeonholed in one political camp or the other, a position that any large-spirited person who was not seeking power but truth might reasonably choose. Since my pursuit as always been truth rather than power, I wished to avoid any of the too familiar religious pigeonholes.

What I failed to remember in the early post on the origins of NPPT turns out to be that not only did Adams want to frame politics with the new psychological theories of his time but he in fact did much the same thing for religion. He turned himself into a flesh-and-blood 'barometer', an instrument to measure the various forces or energies at work in the culture of his time, especially the transition from his century to the 20th century. He does this most effectively in "The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)", a chapter in his famous THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS. In an earlier book, MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES, he are tracked the force of the Virgin that had brought, or at least, symbolized, the unity of European culture in the 13th century. But in the great hall of the dynamos at the Exposition of 1900, Adams felt that "the dynamo became a symbol of infinity, . . . to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force much as the early Christians felt the Cross. . . . one began to pray to it." But the age of the dynamo was the age of multiplicity rather than unity because the dynamo would spread cultural energy away from the center in Rome, or Chartres, to all corners of the earth.

Adams's barometric reaction has a lot in common with the early phenomenological approach to measuring the sense of the holy that Rudolph Otto proposed near the beginning of the 20th century. The power Adams felt before the dynamo resembles the divine fear and trembling of Kierkegaard and Rudolph Otto much more than it does the gentle Enthusiasm of 18th century England or the comforting calmness of the Virgin at Chartres.

Looking back over the posts of Ceriustuff, I realize that he, like Milt Walters and myself, has proposed NPPT as a new barometric or phenomenological approach to religion. But Ceriustuff has the added advantage of employing the Hubble telescope, the psychology of Jung, plus that of the object relations psychologists, in trying to understand why religions persist. These perspectives allow Ceriustuff to choose among deities and to decide where best to focus his attention since, as Sartre's phenomenology contends, we become the objects on our consciousness.

After viewing the Hubble universe universe, Walters and Ceriustuff decide it is counterproductive to focus on deities of numinous awe and fearful trembling. Why? Because the violent destruction and creation of the Hubble universe lacks qualities we need to worship and emulate any more than we would want to emulate Darwin's universe bloody in tooth and claw (though like Darwin we might find comfort in the study of lowly earthworms and other gentle, creative creatures).

We now recognize that the worthiness for worship of any deity of power depends on two factors: the qualities of the deity and the projections of the believer. All the gods of the volcano, the thunder, or the threats of death and punishment depend upon the craven fear and helplessness we project upon them and seek protection from. They are the threatening father and angry mother gods we come to on bent knee and with crushed will. Yes, there is power in the volcano, the storm, the icy look of maternal rejection, but the guilt, fear, and helplessness we paint upon them is our own. So, in the language of Self Psychologist Heinz Kohut, our gods belong among our selfobjects, those entities that though they may have some natural existence of their own, are also parts of our selves that we project because we don't see them within us. We may not give the storm its power to destroy, but we give it the intention to choose minute 'us' as the intended object of its destruction.

In addition, we have to choose our adult selfobjects as carefully as we can because selfobjects become the models for behavior and personality. They become our ego-ideal, as Hitler did for his followers. They, the selfobjects, also become the carriers for the traits and projections we will come to introject or internalize, the way a child slowly internalizes the qualities seen in the first selfobjects, one's mother and/or father.

This internalizing process is one thing that leads both Ceristuff and Milt Walters to transcend the sky gods of the metallic grail and of the unwitting neo-Catharistic, child-slaying Shanti, Shanti and seek the comfort of the Dark Madonna from the simple earth, the Dark Virgin of Limoux who seems to represent life-creation (sex), birth, and protection. Surrounded by those who pursue wealth, power, purity, perfection even through infanticide, Ceriustuff and Walters prefer to 'become conscious of' the Dark Madonna, and they choose thereby to introject her qualities.

At least that is the fictional truth of this blog and of the paired novels, DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS, now available through local bookstores as well as from Amazon and Barnes-Noble online.

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..