I have long held that if the genuine Pauline epistles were all had to go by in assessing the early Christianity, some amazing things would probably be easily agreed to by most students of the first Jesus movements. For example, it seems clear not only that Paul was the only apostolic figure who preached the crucified Christ, but also that he believed Jesus to be Christ precisely because he was crucified. In other words, it seems that the Nazarene missions of James initially did not think of Jesus as Messiah at all, precisely because Christ crucified would have been an obstacle(σκανδαλον) to them, just as he was to the other Jews.'
Galatians is a case in point. Paul claimed that his was the only true gospel, and cursed those who preached to his flock something other than he did (Gal 1:7-8). That he meant specifically missions from Jerusalem in which Cephas figured prominently, of that there is little doubt. Mind you, there is a number of exegetical theories arguing that Paul opponents were really not Jerusalem missionaries but home-grown Judaizing Christians, spiritualists or gnostics, but most scholars would not be swayed by exegesis of stand-alone passages or verses, around which these theories seem to be spun (e.g. W.Luetgert, J. Munck, J.Tyson, W. Schmithals). But, to my mind, the text is emphatic that Paul’s rivals come from Jerusalem or rely on the authority of its assembly. Paul’s poetic association of Sarah and Isaac with Jerusalem above (4:26) cannot be meaningful if the missions from James’ earthly abode are not referenced by it. Similarly, in 5:10, the ‘whoever he (the malefactor) may be’ (οστις εαν η) , would have no impact if the judgment were not invoked for an individual or corporate authority.
But if Paul had a deep, unbridgeable difference with the Nazarenes, why would he insist on collecting money and goods for their saints around the Mediterranean ? There are two answers to that, I believe. The shorter one is, ‘Jesus Christ’, the longer ‘Paul’s psychology’. Let us look at Paul’s motives of going to Jerusalem in the first place, and the structure of the Jerusalem church as it is revealed to us by the epistle to the Galatians.
How many times was Paul in Jerusalem ?
Galatians records two visits of apostle Paul to Jerusalem. As I have hinted in the previous blog (Paul’s Conversion – 9/8/2010), the first journey in 1:18-24 looks doubtful. It appears that Tertullian, in Adversus Marcionem (5.3.1) had no knowledge of the first visit. He refered to Gal 2.1 saying [Paul] writes that after fourteen years he went up to Jerusalem, to seek the support of Peter and the rest of the apostles, to confer with them concerning the content of his gospel, for fear lest for all those years he had run, or was still running, in vain—meaning, if he was preaching the gospel in any form
inconsistent with theirs. Similarly, Irenaeus alluded to the same verse in Adversus Haereses (3.13.3) without the adverb ‘again’. (This relies on H.Detering’s Latin text of Irenaeus, which misses ‘iterum’ in the verse. www.hermann-detering.de/DetGalExpl.pdf). In the case of Tertullian, the failure to cite the omission as an example of Marcion’s ‘mutilating’ the Pauline text is surprising, as he evidently knew a version of Galatians which contained 1:18-24 (1:21 possibly excepted) and quoted from it (ref. to 1:18, 1:24 in Prescription Against Heretics, XXIII.). Among the possible explanations, the one which would be fair to Tertullian is that The Prescription was written after a critique of Marcion (against the Chronology of bishop Kaye).
Apart from the likely textual witness, there is a truly mind-boggling failure of the NT exegesis to observe that Paul on his second visit has no reference to Cephas and James from the first visit. In Gal 2.2, Paul avers he went by revelation to lay his gospel privately (ιδιαν) before those who ‘seemed to be leaders’, or ‘those of repute’ (τοις δοκουσιν). But that does not make sense, does it ? Paul had a revelation, but could not connect it to Cephas and James, whom he ostensibly met eleven years prior, and who he then should know himself were the leaders of the church, i.e. the persons with whom to do business in Zion. Instead, Paul wrote this verse as though he anticipated the outcome of his visit (no doubt to fulfil the revelation), i.e. getting to talk to people who were going to be pointed to him as having some - undetermined - influence in the church. In other words, the fact that Paul had to rely on directions from casual informants to get to talk to James, Cephas and John, belies most decidedly any previous personal contact with the Jerusalem assembly.
Therefore, I discount the report of the first visit which appears motivated by a desire to show that Paul had a much earlier dealings with the church, made perhaps to harmonize his own writing with the legends of Paul in the Acts, where he is a frequent visitor to Jerusalem (chapters 9, 11 , 15, 18 ,21).
The tale of two James’es
Let us now turn our attention to the structure of the Jerusalem community as it is revealed through Paul’s writing. It is interesting that Paul was to meet James, the Lord’s brother, during his first journey to Jerusalem (Gal 1:19). I say that in consideration of the use of the title, which stands in sharp contrast to Paul describing seemingly the same person later as simply one of those who 'seemed to be pillars'. We do have Paul referring to brothers of the Lord elsewhere (1 Cr 9:5) so the appellation existed in his time. The question whether it meant a designation of kinship to the Nazarene Jesus, or whether it denoted some liturgical function, seems to be a rhetorical one, since one cannot presume the use of non-titular Lord to denote kinship to a human – now matter how venerable - among Jews who worshipped in the Temple. The term 'brothers of the Lord' appears to be a cultic designation, akin perhaps to les Templiers, the abbreviation of Les chevaliers du Temple, whose actual full title was Le pauvres chevaliers du Christ et du temple de Salomon à Jerusalem. In analogy, the brothers of the Lord, were likely a truncated familiar version of a title, nonetheless one of respect. One possible full title that comes to mind is οι αδελφοι εν τη διακονια του κυριου, brothers in the service of the Lord.
Irrespective of the authenticity of Gal 1:18-24, and the appellation in 1:19 belonging to him, James the Just was venerated by the community. One glimpse of the unparalleled respect he commanded as the leader of the Jerusalem community of saints is provided by the Gospel of Thomas :
Jesus said to them, "Wherever you are, you are to go to James the Righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth come into being." GoT(12)
This saying predates the death of James (62 CE) as the instruction would serve no purpose after he was gone. Other notable witness of James the Just, the cameo by Hegesippus in Eusebius’ Church History, also describes him is a saintly ascetic man who by all appearances was peerless. One could safely assume that a community which apprehended its leader on those terms would not likely proclaim him as a part of ‘collective leadership’ or tolerate the profaning of his name. This of course prefigures the assessment that James the Just was one of the ‘so-called pillars’ whom Paul met but who added ‘nothing’ to Paul’s stature as apostle. If that were true – i.e. if Paul went to Jerusalem by revelation and achieved what he sought to achieve, i.e. acceptance of himself as bona fide apostle by the highest authority in Jerusalem, why the bitter, disrespectful tone in Paul’s writing ? In the next verse after the identity of Paul’s interlocutors was revealed (2:10), they urged Paul and his co-workers ‘to remember the poor’, the very thing that was on Paul’s mind. Some exegets, notably J.D.G. Dunn, read the aorist active infinitive (ποιησαι) as indication that Paul has already delivered on this intent, however that instantly obscures the function of the pillars’ reminder. I would stand by the standard translation. Who are these poor ? I dare to presume that they are the ‘poor saints’ that Paul provisions in Rom 15:26. Herein, a big surprise !
In my reading of Galatians Paul went to Jerusalem for the first time after fourteen years from his conversion. The number of years coincides with the time of writing sections of 2 Corinthians, (2 Cr 12:2) which are overwhelmed by Paul’s concern for his apostolic status. It appears Paul decided to go to Jerusalem, and offer James the Just his material support for his recognition of him as fully approved apostle of the church. However, he did not make it past the initial screening, because his doctrine of the Law fulfilment in Jesus Christ was judged completely unacceptable (Gal 2:4-5). Paul was instead handled by the three pillars of the church material support (Cephas and the Zebedees), i.e. its missionaries, who themselves travelled and collected money for the poor saints. With them he would have made a deal for his mission to the Gentiles (which was perhaps not as exclusive as Paul made it sound). It appears that there was some promise (or belief of Paul that such promise was made) on behalf of the three, to intercede on behalf of Paul with the church leaders to grant him an audition. This is what I believe can be gleaned from Rom 15:31.
Very well then, when Gal 2:9-10 are cross-referenced with Rom 15:26, 28, 31, a very interesting picture emerges. One, the James of the pillars is not James the Just. Two, the ‘seeming pillars’ do not belong tp the Jerusalem saints. Paul speaks of the pillars (and the Judaizers, in general) in a disrespectful, off-handed manner (no doubt coloured by what happened later), which would hardly be possible to deploy in reference to James the Just. At the same time, he deems it important to record the request of his interlocutors for material support, which again Paul dismisses as superfluous because he himself intended to support the third party, identified as ‘οι πτωχοι’ in Galatians (2:10), and ‘οι πτωχοι των αγιων των εν Ιερουσαλημ’ in Romans (15:26). I much prefer the straightforward translation of the Romans’ double partitive by William Barlow in KJV (independently supported by Luther, Calvin and Blahoslav of the Czech Bible of Kralice) which renders the Greek as ‘poor saints (which are) at Jerusalem’.
At any rate, James, Cephas, and John asked Paul for the support of the saints, from which they are excluded by the context. In Paul’s letters the term saint denotes purity and freedom from sin. The Judaizers themselves do not keep the law – hence the charge of hypocrisy against Cephas and his mission at Antioch. But it is hardly credible that Paul meant to include James the Just himself was an impious law-breaker, who wanted to glory in the Galatians’ flesh. So, if Paul wanted to collect for James and his poor saints, it may be safely assumed they were not among those against whom he riles. Paul needed the acceptance of James the Just to silence his detractors, and as it is apparent from Galatians, the missions from Jerusalem formed a big part of that problem.
What is on the other side of the ledger ? Could James the Zebedee have been still around for Paul to meet ? I am frankly surprised at the degree of consensus that exists among NT scholars on the identity of James in 2:9, given that the only historical markers here come from the Acts in which the execution of James the Zebedee (12:1) precedes the ‘conference’ (15:4-29), the latter which does not track with Galatians at all. But in fact, there are echos of Gal 2 all over Acts 11, including Peter’s following orders from above to break kashrut, men coming from Jerusalem to Antioch, and Paul with Barnabas going to Jerusalem, though not with just a promise of aid but delivering it. The objection then has more to do with traditional beliefs of Paul connecting with the highest echelons of the Jerusalem hierarchy, than anything that could be described as historical evidence for it.
However in reality, not just Paul but the 'pillars' themselves did not figure as the church top leaders. Their being on top surely looks like a part of the myth of self-foundation of the Christian church in Jerusalem as proclaimed by the Acts. But as we shall see (in one of the future blogs) there is another, much more realistic scenario of the Jesus cult beginnings in Jerusalem. James the Just’s assembly acted as the shelter and protector for a variety of messianic and apocalyptic cults. Jesus’ entourage was adopted into the church and sent to proclaim Jesus as the prophet of last days. The pillars were Jesus missionaries of James. Similarly, there were disciples and missions of John the Baptists in the assembly and in the Diaspora. It is only later, after the first Jewish war, when Christianity consolidated outside of Palestine, that the church of James began to be portrayed exclusively as ‘Christian’ church, and James the Just as Jesus’ brother. Figures like Cephas and the Zebedees rose in prominence as chief figures of James’ assembly, eventually displacing him in importance as the gospels came to be written with the focus shifting exclusively on the Nazarene Jesus.
But Paul tells us something else: the pillars urged him to support the poor saints, a body of venerated church sages to which they evidently did not belong themselves. That Cephas, specifically, ranked much lower than James the Just is also apparent from the incident at Antioch. He ate with the Gentiles until certain men came ‘from James’. Then he quickly distanced himself. Cephas could be thought of as a high-ranking church dignitary, if he were not a member of mammalian species where males are organized in functional hierarchies. At issue here is his yielding to members who presumably were of lower ranking than he on fear that a faction within the church (the circumcision party) would have prevailed in a showdown before James. It is hard to grasp that Cephas, an established leader within the church and a former confidante of Jesus would have not have a standing that would protect him from petty tyrannies of subordinates. If the organization was built as a memorial cult of the Nazarene Jesus, and he was on record saying things like ‘nothing a man eats can defile him’ (Mk 7:15), Cephas would have been well within his rights to eat whatever he pleased, even before the Holy Spirit told him so on the roof of a house in Joffa. It appears then, that if Cephas changed his behaviour at a mere sight of men coming who had audience with James, then James was a highly dominant figure over him and an undisputed head of an assembly which was built on different values than Cephas was accustomed to. The incident is best explained by his conforming to expectations established wholly outside of his assigned competence. His craven retreat from the Gentile dining halls also explains why Paul did not have to bother to distinguish between James ‘the pillar’ (in 2:9), and James the Just (in 2:12). James the Just was a name that presumably needed no introduction in the circles that Paul moved. His authority was understood by all who had association with the sectaries.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Paul's Conversion
Only a few of the stories in the gospels and Acts can compete for high drama with the ambush of Saul by Jesus on the road to Damascus. Saul, ‘still breathing threats and murder’, receives commission from the high priest in Jerusalem to arrest Jesus followers in Damascus (Acts 9). As he and his party draw near their destination, a flash from heaven knocks Saul rudely to the ground with a public audio feed demanding to know why Saul is persecuting the assaulting party. (In the repeat of the story in chapters 22 and 26 it is the video that goes public and the audio only feeds to Saul). The voice identifies itself to Saul as 'Jesus whom you are persecuting', and instructs him to enter the city and wait for further instructions. To assure Saul’s compliance, and underline the Risen One’s displeasure with his adversary’s persecutory lust, Saul is blinded, and made unable to feed or hydrate himself. Given what Jesus later tells the reluctant healer Ananias (9:15), it is clear that Saul (soon to be renamed to Paul) is pressed into service under duress, and with no real options.
The tale of Paul’s conversion in Acts is most likely Luke’s invention. It has a Lukan signature prominently displayed also in the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), the disembowelling of Judas' (Acts 1:18-19) and in Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-5:11), namely – as I have already hinted above - persecutory lust. I see no other motive for telling such stories than Luke’s rather exquisitely sadistic relish in justice. Be it as it may: Paul’s encounter of the unpleasant kind on the road to Damascus has sunk deep as Christian lore, and remains firmly planted in the minds of not only the regular church-goers but also the most sophisticated theologians.
In their Search for Paul, J.D.Crossan and Johanthan L.Reed, more or less take the Damascus incident for granted. They operate on the unquestioned premise (one supplied by Luke with no real support of contemporary sources) that the church of James the Just proclaimed the Nazarene Jesus as Messiah, and that Paul opposed the apostles violently for reasons unknown. The authors state that the account of Acts agree with Paul (Gal 1:17) in that Damascus was the inaugural apparition, revelation, conversion and vocation for Paul. Unfortunately, this noble effort at harmonization will not work. Not only Gal 1:15-17 does not in any way support the Acts story, it blatantly contradicts Luke :
But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus (εις Ἀραβιαν και παλιν υπεστρεψα εις Δαμασκον ).
Paul knows nothing about a mission to Damascus to round up Jesus believers. He receives his commission directly from God, does not consult with any man, and goes first to Arabia (Nabataea) and then returns (!) to Damascus. Further, and that I hold is of crucial importance in assessing Paul’s change of heart, he does not experience his revelation of Christ in the first instance as a hugely dysphoric, expiatory ordeal. Paul is called by God, through his grace (δια της χαριτος αυτου). That does not square with Luke’s account of heavenly Jesus robbing Saul of joie de vivre as a first thing in the process of introducing himself as a loving deity to the Gentiles. It is curious how even highly respected exegets miss on such important details in attempts to align the texts. Not all of them, of course. E.P. Sanders e.g. (Paul, Oxford 1993) states plainly that the Galatians 1:15-17 flatly contradicts Luke’s tale. But not so one of the leading Pauline scholars of the day, J.D.G. Dunn. He sees 'the three Acts accounts' as confirming what Paul himself says : God revealed his Son in him, in order that he might preach him among Gentiles. Dunn believes that Paul’s gospel was 'shared' with Jerusalem (J.D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1998, p.178). The problem, if not quite the devil, however is in the details.
Did Paul Persecute the Church ?
I am not altogether convinced Paul persecuted the church. For one, a singular church of Christ (that thought of itself that way) did not yet exist. Also, the verses in the genuine Paulines in which Paul admits to persecuting ‘the church of God’ unfortunately all appear in passages of dubious authenticity (1 Cr 15:9, Gal 1:13, 1:23, Phl 3:6). They bear marks of later heavy-handed attempts to make Paul look like an apostolic figure converted to Christ through the confluence of personal revelation and the agency of the church as it developed later. But the mechanics of the conversion as shown in Acts look contrived and false. Paul received the Holy Spirit from God and not through church ordination (9:17). Paul had absolute certainty about his commission, and its provenance and it was not dependent on men in the least. Galatians, especially speak to Paul’s independence from Jerusalem. True, Paul went to Jerusalem but clearly it was to seek approval for his doctrine and the confirmation of his apostolic status, not to be tutored (Gal 1:17, 2:2).
The two passages in Gal 1 which mention Paul’s persecution (13-14, 18-24) look suspicious: the first breaks Paul’s expose of his credentials, uses a word not known elsewhere in the corpus (ιουδαισμος), and asserts he persecuted the church ‘excessively’ or ‘violently’ (καθ’ υπερβολην) trying to destroy it. The remarks, although not unbelievable in themselves, simply do not fit in the context. The digression to Paul’e pre-conversion status seems contrived, as is the church in singular (εκκλησια) coupled with the vehemence of Paul’s pursuit. The verses protest too much. There are similar issues with the other passage, the one dealing with Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem. Paul goes there to ‘acquaint himself’ (ιστορεω) with Peter. This again is a strange hapax legomenon, as is the classing of Cephas, as an apostle, contra 1 Cr 9:5 and 1 Cr 15:5. The ου ψευδομαι oath in 1:20 only heightens the suspicions arising from Tertullian and Irenaeus, both apparently knowing a text of Galatians that lacked the mention of Paul’s first visit. The biggest issue that I see with the 1:18-24 passage however is that Paul on the second visit does not seem to know himself who to contact in Jerusalem and relies on forward references from the church. He ends up with three functionaries of the church 'reputed to be pillars' (οι δοκουντες στυλοι). It strikes me frankly as incredible that Paul, having spent a fortnight with Cephas some time previous and naming him an apostle (by logical implication, 1:19) would not go to him directly as a known leader of the highest ranking. Surely, the grace given to Paul that Paul said Cephas thought worthy of fellowship, would not have had to wait eleven years after the two men first set sights on each other.
Paradoxically, it seems to be the epistle to the Galatians outside of these passages which suggests the likely origin of the legend that Paul persecuted the church of the Nazarenes. The tone of the letter is uncompromising: it is either Paul’s gospel or the flames of hell:
…not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. Gal 1:7-8
I have confidence that you will take no other view than mine and he who is troubling you will bear his judgment …I wish those who unsettle would mutilate themselves Gal 5:10-12
There seems to be a gentlemanly agreement among the learned exegets not to take Paul’s hostile outbursts and curses lobbied in the direction of the James’ missions on their face value. Most of the NT scholarship subscribes to the view that there was one mother church for all Jesus believers established by the mass baptism on the Pentecost (or a silent agreement among the disciples) shortly after Jesus was crucified. All looked to Jerusalem whence Jesus was preached as Christ. In these scholarly circles Paul’s apostolic agony tends to be discounted as a minor skirmish over observances. In my reading of Galatians, however, the issue central to Paul is his teaching of the crucified Messiah, which concept was alien to the Nazarenes in Paul’s time. They believed in Yeshua as an apostle of the last days, killed by lawless Gentiles and their temple priest collaborators (Acts 2:23, interpolated 1 Th 2:14-15). Jesus entourage was subsequently absorbed into a pre-existing congregation of James the Just whose assembly likely sheltered heterodox messianist beliefs and leaderless cults, among them the followers of John the Baptist. The martyred Galilean Yeshua was connected by midrash with the vision of Zechariah 3, and venerated in the church as a heavenly intercessor for the coming of Davidic messiah to restore Israel. This plan for the last days clashed head on with Paul’s revelation of Jesus as the resurrected heavenly messiah himself, who would in near future return and collect his faithful flock above ground. It was the resurrectional schema of Paul which came under attack in Galatia. Paul’s all-out counter, in which judgment was invoked, might have been the type of verbal assault that earned Paul the reputation as the persecutor of the Nazarenes.
None of this, naturally, excludes the possibility that Paul did speak out against the Nazarenes or other sects of apocalyptic messianism prior to his conversion. He probably did do that, as he was a man of strong convictions. The tradition that Paul was a Judaic traditionalist before receiving his calling appears genuine. I am persuaded of this by the remarkable schism on Paul’s pre-conversion view of Jesus in the NT texts. On the one hand, there is the unapologetic view written into the Gal. 1 passages and Philippians 3:6. Paul was a godly, upright learned Jewish tradesman, who was called upon by God to proclaim his revelation. This version of Paul is probably authentic tradition, as it fits Paul’s self-image he consistently presents elsewhere (Rom 1:1, 1 Cr 1:1, 7:20-24, 2 Cr 1:1, 3:5, Gal 1:15-17). There is no shame or even a shade of ‘repentance’ present in Paul’s conversion. Quite the contrary, it is very clear that Paul considered his ministry an election, a service for which he was called and for which he received adequate resourcing. Sharply contrasting with this image, is one of repentant Paul, written into the Acts legend of the Damascus encounter, 1 Cr 15:9, and what appears a shameless retroactive falsification of Paul’s mind in 1 Ti 1:13-14 (‘though I formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted him; but I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me…’). These, naturally, do not have much to do with Paul, the man who is the subject of my study.
To sum up, my scepticism touches on the level of hostile engagement against the Nazarene assemblies imputed to Paul by some texts. Let this be said plainly: there is no evidence in Paul’s writing that he was either violent personally, or encouraged physical violence against adversaries. It is unlikely that Paul’s conversion would have radically changed his behavioural patterns with respect to advocating or orchestrating the use of violence. Paul’s hostility would have been verbal and confined to denunciations of opponents.
What Did Paul Believe about Jesus prior to Conversion ?
Paul was a hellenized Jew, who was born and lived in the Diaspora likely all his life. His social status was middle class, probably on the lower end of the middle. By Luke’s account he made a living as a tentmaker (σκηνοποιoς – Acts 18:3). Paul’s education is an unknown variable to most NT scholars, as Luke’s account of him as a disciple of Gemaliel (Acts 22:3) is best set aside as a story-teller’s license. For one, Saul’s blood lust against the Jesus sect that Luke swore by, would have been at odds with the teachings of Gemaliel and rabbinism generally. Nor is there in Paul a discernible trace of formal education, obtained through a public gymnasium or a private παιδαγωγος. Paul does not concern himself in the least with Greek philosophy even though the apostle certainly looks like someone keenly aware of his superior intellect, one with high intellectual ambitions, and one none too shy to display his learning. I am persuaded by an echo of the familiar tune of Frank Sinatra omnipresent in Paul letters, that their writer was self-sufficient in everything. As he apparently did it (all) his way, he would have been also self-educated.
As Paul was highly intelligent he would have easily dominated in most social settings where he put appearance. His learning and literacy would have been considered a mark of superiority in the circles he moved, regardless of pedigree. In this connection, one needs also to take into account the new situation that the translation of the Tanakh into Greek created. The Septuagint would have an effect similar to that of the Bible in the Middle Ages appearing in native languages of the European continent. The wider availability of the scripture meant that it could no longer be claimed by a small class of scribes and interpreters. It would have been accessible to bright urban autodidacts like Paul and his social milieu. ( Paul’s later missionary focus on the Gentiles interested in Judaism, would have also assured Paul’s supremacy as only the Jewish sages learned in the scripture would have been in a position to challenge Paul’s reading of the texts. And no doubt they would have found Paul outrageous. Start with the passages of non-titular Lord that the mystagogue abducted to make them seem to refer to his visions of a heavenly Redeemer.)
What Paul’s theology was prior to conversion is difficult to gauge. We may assume that he was conservative, and tending to a pietist variety of the faith. Paul’s manner also makes it quite probable that the ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude, so often present in his letters would have been a character trait preceding Paul’s career as an apostle of Christ. This Paul presumably did not have a friendly disposition to the missions of apocalyptic messianists from Jerusalem that he was encountering. He would have regarded the ecstatics, their ways and their beliefs them as plainly crazy (1 Cr 11:23, 14:23).
We are told by Paul that he once regarded Christ κατα σαρκα, i.e. from a vulgar point of view (2 Cr 5:16), which means he knew of Jesus from ordinary communication with other humans prior to receiving his revelation. This interpretation and the other apparently direct link to Jesus of the Nazarenes (1 Cr 2:2) was challenged by Earl Doherty on one of the discussion Boards. He stated that Paul’s adversaries believed in another version of the Christ myth, in which Jesus was not crucified. Unfortunately, he was not able to explain how Paul could have claimed that the Nazarene missions wanted to avoid persecution for the cross of Christ (Gal 6:12), if this cross was of a non-earthly origin. If the crucifixion was mythical and everyone knew it, then Paul’s injuction ‘will know nothing among you, other than Jesus Christ and him crucified’ equals in significance a taboo on discussing the deeds of Prometheus prior to his liver getting pecked out. Far worse though, accusing Cephas and his mission of fear of being persecuted for something they did not believe existed, would have reduced Paul’s apostolic reach only to the most destitute among the intellectual paupers.
Paul’s pre-conversion view of Jesus, κατα σαρκα, is summarized by 1 Cr 1:23 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
Paul, the urbane Hellenist, simply would not have accepted the proclamation of a prophet who was crucified by authorities as a criminal. It would have been folly to him. Why would God want to choose some illiterate Galilean peasant to incite a riot about the coming kingdom ? Besides, the authorities do not punish innocent people. In his conservatism, Paul could not even conceive of an unjust punishment (Rom 13:1-5). His view would have been seen as extreme even in his own time , but it is not one that is unparalleled in the history of religious thought. The Islamic theologian ibn Taymiyyah, who lived during the Mongol invasions of the Middle East, held similar opinions, saying famously that sixty years of tyrannical rule were preferable to one day of civil disorder.
Paul, the pious Jew, would have been outraged by the idolatry of the Nazarenes to an executed criminal proclaimed as a holy apostle of God (Hbr 3:1) and a martyr for his kingdom (Mt 23:37-39). This man was hanged on a tree (or the era’s equivalent punishment) and therefore demonstrated as one accursed of God. How could he become the heavenly intercessor for the coming of God`s kingdom ? The nomenclatura of the messianist sectaries would have no doubt offended Paul’s sense of righteousness cultivated by faithful observance of Jewish legalities and customs.
One final question on pre-conversion Paul concerns his own messianic expectations. I do not think they were strong, for a number of reasons. Paul had a tragic view of human existence which was not something brought about by his acquaintance with Christ. Much more likely it was the other way round. IMHO, it is unlikely that his belief that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cr 15:50, originated in the revelation of Christ. It looks rather an antithesis to the materialistic messianism which Paul had rejected. The Diaspora middle class that Paul counted himself in, would have been far removed from the popular clamour for a ‘shepherd king’ a la David, to restore Israel as sovereign kingdom, free of injustice and oppression. Its focus would have been on the local community, with whatever temporal issues it faced. A few prosperous Diaspora Jews would have been overwhelmed by eschatological speculations. Similarly the intellectuals: Josephus, even though a proud Jewish patriot, would not have seen the rise of a restored kingdom of Israel, as displacing Rome’s power in its vicinity. Rome’s emperor would have done fine as messiah. Philo’s primary interest lied in the integration of Jewish monotheism into the overwhelming influence of the Greco-Roman civilization. His interest lied squarely in marrying the Jewish wisdom traditions to Greek philosophy, an interest which was alien to the messianist vistas of a restored kingdom. The reality of Rome’s power was driven home to all Jewish intellectuals who were familiar with it. Only a few harboured hopes for a supernatural intervention by God, in making it all happen. Paul would not have been among them.
The Ecstatic Experience as Conversion
The wide acceptance of the road to Damascus incident as real history has had one interesting side effect. Paul has been classed as an epileptic, almost universally. This is not a modern view of Paul. Epilepsy has been called St.Paul’s Disease in Ireland for centuries. No doubt, the photism and collapse of Paul during the vision as described by Luke has led most to conclude that Paul suffered from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). This view is strengthened the story revealing that Paul, though blinded, was able to walk on his own. If Paul had suffered a stroke he would not have been able to walk far. Since TLE is known to produce strong religious conversion experiences, a little attention has been paid to Paul’s letters and the clues they provide as to his medical profile. In consequence, his assumed epilepsy has not been seriously challenged with the exception of those who caution that there is not really much to go on in a way of diagnosis. Despite the occasional disclaimer there has not been, to my knowledge, a serious interest from the medical professionals to assess Paul condition based on articulations he himself provides.
An historical review by D.Landsborough (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 1987:50) St.Paul and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy provides a fair example of how the assessments are done. Paul’s personal data are lifted from the Acts, and the composite sketch relies on such verities as his inheritance of Roman citizenship, and his formal education received in Jerusalem. He is said to be the 'first man of letters in the early church'. Paul’s self-described out-of-body journey to third heaven with the consequent attacks by Satan, is seen as bearing ‘a close resemblance to the psychic and perceptual resemblance of a temporal lobe seizure, albeit of spiritual experience for Paul’. The author cautions that we do not know whether Paul showed any abnormal physical signs. ‘If this was TLE it is very unlikely that there were – ‘the story is all’ ‘. He also cites C.H.Rieu assessment (Acts of the Apostles, Penguin 1957) of Paul as ‘a whirlwind of passions: ‘Hate, anger, depression, jostle with tenderness, love and hope, and all in extremes’. The essay goes on to mention Galatians (4:13-14) acknowledging Paul’s preaching of the gospel on account of illness. The apostle’s not being ‘despised’ for his condition is taken to mean he was free from being spat upon (morbus qui sputatur). Spitting can be described as a superstitious reaction by by-standers to an attack of epilepsy, though the article admits that the rude treatment was not necessarily specific to that disease.
In the analysis of 2 Cor 12:1-9, a number of indicators are seen as the artifact of a seizure, a disembodied state, aura of depersonalization, and inability to describe the experience are in the view of the author due to an ‘ intensely esoteric, rapturous state associated with an elaborate auditory sensation whose details cannot be recollected’. The writer believes that τη υπερβολυ των αποκαλυψεων (which his translation renders as 'wealth of visions') may bespeak of a number of experiences, which have a disagreeable sequel to them, described as a ‘thorn in the flesh’, and interpreted as recurring unpleasant motor disturbances. The latter is also seen as possible reference to the inner experience of a grand mal seizure. Generally, it is affirmed that the conversion, the recurrence of attacks and the nature of personality changes, which a quoted source describes as ‘inter-ictal’ such as ‘increased concern with, and writing on philosophical, moral and religious issues’, diminution of sexual activity, aggressiveness, are consistent with the diagnosis of TLE.
It is interesting to observe how easily Paul matches the epileptic profile in studies like these. There seem to be almost no counter-indications. Paul’s self-described illness and states of mind seem to fit seamlessly into the Damascus incident.
Yet, we do have the evidence of R.M.Bucke (see the preceding blog The Origin of My Interest…) , a trained physician who would immediately have recognized the epileptic nature of Paul’s visionary experience (as he would have known his own). Paul describes himself as glossolalic (1 Cr 14:18) and apparently insists that this activity be controlled when the church assembles. It is hard to credit that Paul would have attempted to regulate tongue speaking if this activity was spontaneous and beyond the control of the sufferers. He classes himself as a member of the spiritualist assembly. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…and all were made to drink of one Spirit (1 Cr 12:13). The metaphoric intoxication by the Spirit is an important diagnostic clue, as it permeates the texts (e.g. the marriage at Cana, in John 2, the mass baptism at the Pentecost, Acts 2, Thomas 13 & 108). At minimum, this suggests that Paul’s ecstatic seizures, or seizure-like symptoms, were triggered periodically by protracted episodes of euphoric excitement. If we read Paul’s prominent displays of moodiness in this context, the diagnostic profile will soon tilt to issues of loss of control of moods, and the letters can be read as almost classical self-describing exhibits of manic-depressive illness. (More on Paul’s bipolar challenge in a future blog).
Does 2 Cor 12:1-9 describe Paul’s Conversion ?
As I have indicated already, there is a significant difference between the conversion experience as portrayed by Luke in Acts 9, and Paul’s own testimony in Gal 1:15-16. God called Paul through his grace and was pleased to reveal his Son in Paul. Some textual commentators say that the phrase οτε δε ευδοκησεν ο θεος, (but when God was pleased) is a later addition. If it is not, it shows Paul misallocating his affective tie to the event, projecting it as God’s feelings. At any rate, the phrasing shows that the revelation was received as a positive and ennobling transport by Paul contrasting sharply with the assault on, and abduction of, Saul by vengeful Jesus on the road to Damascus.
Gal 1:15-16 seems to be elaborated by 2 Cor 12:1-9:
1) I must boast; there is nothing to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord.
The lead-in verse is important in that it should take care of exegetical objections that what follows may not be the description of the inaugural Paul’s revelation of Christ. With this verse, it is really difficult to see why Paul should would omit reference to his first revelatory experience, if the preceding defence of his apostolic status vis-à-vis competition is not strong enough argument.
2) I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.
Paul switches here to the third person singular to stress both the unreality of what he experienced and the loss of self in the euphoric ascent. It is also important to grasp Paul’s relating himself as in Christ even after all these years - which is to stress the lasting effect the conversion had.
3) And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—
4) and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.
Reaching a euphoric peak (the paradise), Paul could not distinguish between internal and external stimuli. The gnosis imparted was not permissible to speak about – although the question arises whether by this manoeuvre Paul seeks to convey the lack of communicability of the inner state brought about by sustained mental excitement.
5) On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.
6) Though if I wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me.
Paul asserts that he – as a mature individual with a sense of identity – has no claim on the theophany. This connects with Paul’s description of the son revealed in him (εν εμοι) in Gal 1:15. Paul observes this protocol in his letters distinguishing his personal view and the commands or revelations of the Lord. The border however becomes blurred as Paul seems to appropriate the mind of Christ (υμεις δε νουν Χριστου εχομεν – 1 Cr 2:16) for his group, and sees himself as the unchallengeable spokesman for it (Gal 5:10, Rom 2:16, Rom 16:25).
7) And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.
Even though the thorn in the flesh (σκoλοψ τη σαρκι) does not specify the nature of the discomfort it is clear that in Paul’s mind it reduces the grandiose inflation of self-esteem which characterizes the initial phase of the transport, through torment and physical suffering. This is a most significant disclosure of Paul, as it captures the counter polarity to his euphoria, and grasps its function in returning Paul to reality.
8) Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me;9) but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
Verses 8-9 confirm the cyclical nature of the process. Paul goes up to the pinnacle of euphoria where he is showered with glorious revelations and is brought down each time into decrepitude through a painful manifold of persecutory calamities (for an inventory see 2 Cr 11:23-33). To protect his ego from becoming too damaged in the falls from grace, he disengages himself from the glorious heights and assigns them to the risen Lord, of whose glory he is sent to testify.
I have found through many years of discussions most people seem reluctant to accept that 2 Cor 12:1-9 describes Paul’s visions and revelations (ὀπτασίας καὶ ἀποκαλύψεις) of the Lord. Even though Paul tells them it does, their upbringing and schooling makes them look subconsciously for an event resembling the road to Damascus. It is not there, ergo it cannot be the conversion experience ! I had a discussion on this with a very intelligent and knowledgeable historian of antiquity. He said he was not convinced that 2 Cor 12:2 describes the inaugural revelation of Christ to Paul. I asked him what reason Paul would have to omit the most important event of all, given the context of the defence of his ministry, in which the account was given. Why would he hold back ? He did not know. I suggested that the scepticism was simply an ingrained habit of thought which seeks to connect Paul’s letters to the Acts. He said 'maybe'. But it appears there was no Saul on the road to Damascus. It is a literary, fictional adaptation of Paul’s onset of acute bipolarity, in which he began to experience the Spirit (as described in The Doctor Who Could not Heal Himself – July 2010).
How did Paul connect his experience to the Nazarene Jesus ?
This is probably the question of all questions. My view is this: Paul was doubtless shaken up by the experience once his first episode was over. We do not know whether he had at the beginning of his experience of boundless euphoria some discussions, agonized arguments, or thoughts on the subject which then carried on into the episode. It is most likely however that Paul became preoccupied with Jesus during the protracted period of agitation (the mean duration of hypermanic excitement is about six weeks) , and as it progressed in stages to mind-states totally unfamiliar to Paul, he began to ascribe the uncanny joy to the Jesus entity. This continued through the terrifying, persecutory stage of the episode, which Paul came to associate with Jesus’ death on the cross. It was no cheap metaphor. Eric Kraepelin, the German psychiatrist who defined the manic-depressive disorder, wrote ‘very commonly it is asserted that the disease is a greater torture than any other, that the patient would far, far rather endure any bodily pain than disorder of the mind’. (E. Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, tr. By Mary Barclay, Edinburgh, 1921, p.22).
Coming out of the episode, a part of which was hugely exhilarating but which then morphed into a nightmare of living hell, Paul must have been scared stiff. He realized how totally defenceless he was in his madness , and he would have defined his behaviour as such once he regained his faculties. He was now like the ecstatic freaks which he previously despised.
Reflecting on his own states of non-compos mentis and physical afflictions after the mystical peaks, he paralleled them with the reports of Jesus' sayings and doings, and decided that the earthly Jesus was "led" by the same spirit as he, Paul, was and that he followed the spirit as it led him inexorably to the cross. The kingdom Jesus believed could be brought to earth from heaven by God in the messianic age (as Paul received it through the grapevine from the disciples' following) were delusions, but delusions planted by God (2 Cr 5:21). Paul reasoned that if Jesus was deluded by God and crucified because he, in his delusions was made to break the Mosaic law, then his death could not signify but the absurdity of human life. But if Jesus' death had a hidden meaning, and his apparent madness that caused his violent end was actually designed by God to show Paul (and through Paul) that Jesus' and Paul's own madness was not what it seemed to others then there was hope. If the delusions of grandeur, were actually how God worked and the ecstatic peaks of pleasure and fulfilment a revelatory preview of the life in Jesus Christ that comes after one has faithfully served God, then Paul was not mad and Jesus was Lord. If Paul could dissociate his ego from the grandeur he was experiencing he would retain a measure of sanity and win salvation by proclaiming the glory as Christ's. Whatever else can one say of Paul, he convinced enough fellow pneumatics of his and their special commission, and they in turn found enough following in their communities for it, that they built a solid believer base. That base was Paul's proof that he had seen the Lord.
The tale of Paul’s conversion in Acts is most likely Luke’s invention. It has a Lukan signature prominently displayed also in the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), the disembowelling of Judas' (Acts 1:18-19) and in Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-5:11), namely – as I have already hinted above - persecutory lust. I see no other motive for telling such stories than Luke’s rather exquisitely sadistic relish in justice. Be it as it may: Paul’s encounter of the unpleasant kind on the road to Damascus has sunk deep as Christian lore, and remains firmly planted in the minds of not only the regular church-goers but also the most sophisticated theologians.
In their Search for Paul, J.D.Crossan and Johanthan L.Reed, more or less take the Damascus incident for granted. They operate on the unquestioned premise (one supplied by Luke with no real support of contemporary sources) that the church of James the Just proclaimed the Nazarene Jesus as Messiah, and that Paul opposed the apostles violently for reasons unknown. The authors state that the account of Acts agree with Paul (Gal 1:17) in that Damascus was the inaugural apparition, revelation, conversion and vocation for Paul. Unfortunately, this noble effort at harmonization will not work. Not only Gal 1:15-17 does not in any way support the Acts story, it blatantly contradicts Luke :
But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus (εις Ἀραβιαν και παλιν υπεστρεψα εις Δαμασκον ).
Paul knows nothing about a mission to Damascus to round up Jesus believers. He receives his commission directly from God, does not consult with any man, and goes first to Arabia (Nabataea) and then returns (!) to Damascus. Further, and that I hold is of crucial importance in assessing Paul’s change of heart, he does not experience his revelation of Christ in the first instance as a hugely dysphoric, expiatory ordeal. Paul is called by God, through his grace (δια της χαριτος αυτου). That does not square with Luke’s account of heavenly Jesus robbing Saul of joie de vivre as a first thing in the process of introducing himself as a loving deity to the Gentiles. It is curious how even highly respected exegets miss on such important details in attempts to align the texts. Not all of them, of course. E.P. Sanders e.g. (Paul, Oxford 1993) states plainly that the Galatians 1:15-17 flatly contradicts Luke’s tale. But not so one of the leading Pauline scholars of the day, J.D.G. Dunn. He sees 'the three Acts accounts' as confirming what Paul himself says : God revealed his Son in him, in order that he might preach him among Gentiles. Dunn believes that Paul’s gospel was 'shared' with Jerusalem (J.D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1998, p.178). The problem, if not quite the devil, however is in the details.
Did Paul Persecute the Church ?
I am not altogether convinced Paul persecuted the church. For one, a singular church of Christ (that thought of itself that way) did not yet exist. Also, the verses in the genuine Paulines in which Paul admits to persecuting ‘the church of God’ unfortunately all appear in passages of dubious authenticity (1 Cr 15:9, Gal 1:13, 1:23, Phl 3:6). They bear marks of later heavy-handed attempts to make Paul look like an apostolic figure converted to Christ through the confluence of personal revelation and the agency of the church as it developed later. But the mechanics of the conversion as shown in Acts look contrived and false. Paul received the Holy Spirit from God and not through church ordination (9:17). Paul had absolute certainty about his commission, and its provenance and it was not dependent on men in the least. Galatians, especially speak to Paul’s independence from Jerusalem. True, Paul went to Jerusalem but clearly it was to seek approval for his doctrine and the confirmation of his apostolic status, not to be tutored (Gal 1:17, 2:2).
The two passages in Gal 1 which mention Paul’s persecution (13-14, 18-24) look suspicious: the first breaks Paul’s expose of his credentials, uses a word not known elsewhere in the corpus (ιουδαισμος), and asserts he persecuted the church ‘excessively’ or ‘violently’ (καθ’ υπερβολην) trying to destroy it. The remarks, although not unbelievable in themselves, simply do not fit in the context. The digression to Paul’e pre-conversion status seems contrived, as is the church in singular (εκκλησια) coupled with the vehemence of Paul’s pursuit. The verses protest too much. There are similar issues with the other passage, the one dealing with Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem. Paul goes there to ‘acquaint himself’ (ιστορεω) with Peter. This again is a strange hapax legomenon, as is the classing of Cephas, as an apostle, contra 1 Cr 9:5 and 1 Cr 15:5. The ου ψευδομαι oath in 1:20 only heightens the suspicions arising from Tertullian and Irenaeus, both apparently knowing a text of Galatians that lacked the mention of Paul’s first visit. The biggest issue that I see with the 1:18-24 passage however is that Paul on the second visit does not seem to know himself who to contact in Jerusalem and relies on forward references from the church. He ends up with three functionaries of the church 'reputed to be pillars' (οι δοκουντες στυλοι). It strikes me frankly as incredible that Paul, having spent a fortnight with Cephas some time previous and naming him an apostle (by logical implication, 1:19) would not go to him directly as a known leader of the highest ranking. Surely, the grace given to Paul that Paul said Cephas thought worthy of fellowship, would not have had to wait eleven years after the two men first set sights on each other.
Paradoxically, it seems to be the epistle to the Galatians outside of these passages which suggests the likely origin of the legend that Paul persecuted the church of the Nazarenes. The tone of the letter is uncompromising: it is either Paul’s gospel or the flames of hell:
…not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. Gal 1:7-8
I have confidence that you will take no other view than mine and he who is troubling you will bear his judgment …I wish those who unsettle would mutilate themselves Gal 5:10-12
There seems to be a gentlemanly agreement among the learned exegets not to take Paul’s hostile outbursts and curses lobbied in the direction of the James’ missions on their face value. Most of the NT scholarship subscribes to the view that there was one mother church for all Jesus believers established by the mass baptism on the Pentecost (or a silent agreement among the disciples) shortly after Jesus was crucified. All looked to Jerusalem whence Jesus was preached as Christ. In these scholarly circles Paul’s apostolic agony tends to be discounted as a minor skirmish over observances. In my reading of Galatians, however, the issue central to Paul is his teaching of the crucified Messiah, which concept was alien to the Nazarenes in Paul’s time. They believed in Yeshua as an apostle of the last days, killed by lawless Gentiles and their temple priest collaborators (Acts 2:23, interpolated 1 Th 2:14-15). Jesus entourage was subsequently absorbed into a pre-existing congregation of James the Just whose assembly likely sheltered heterodox messianist beliefs and leaderless cults, among them the followers of John the Baptist. The martyred Galilean Yeshua was connected by midrash with the vision of Zechariah 3, and venerated in the church as a heavenly intercessor for the coming of Davidic messiah to restore Israel. This plan for the last days clashed head on with Paul’s revelation of Jesus as the resurrected heavenly messiah himself, who would in near future return and collect his faithful flock above ground. It was the resurrectional schema of Paul which came under attack in Galatia. Paul’s all-out counter, in which judgment was invoked, might have been the type of verbal assault that earned Paul the reputation as the persecutor of the Nazarenes.
None of this, naturally, excludes the possibility that Paul did speak out against the Nazarenes or other sects of apocalyptic messianism prior to his conversion. He probably did do that, as he was a man of strong convictions. The tradition that Paul was a Judaic traditionalist before receiving his calling appears genuine. I am persuaded of this by the remarkable schism on Paul’s pre-conversion view of Jesus in the NT texts. On the one hand, there is the unapologetic view written into the Gal. 1 passages and Philippians 3:6. Paul was a godly, upright learned Jewish tradesman, who was called upon by God to proclaim his revelation. This version of Paul is probably authentic tradition, as it fits Paul’s self-image he consistently presents elsewhere (Rom 1:1, 1 Cr 1:1, 7:20-24, 2 Cr 1:1, 3:5, Gal 1:15-17). There is no shame or even a shade of ‘repentance’ present in Paul’s conversion. Quite the contrary, it is very clear that Paul considered his ministry an election, a service for which he was called and for which he received adequate resourcing. Sharply contrasting with this image, is one of repentant Paul, written into the Acts legend of the Damascus encounter, 1 Cr 15:9, and what appears a shameless retroactive falsification of Paul’s mind in 1 Ti 1:13-14 (‘though I formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted him; but I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me…’). These, naturally, do not have much to do with Paul, the man who is the subject of my study.
To sum up, my scepticism touches on the level of hostile engagement against the Nazarene assemblies imputed to Paul by some texts. Let this be said plainly: there is no evidence in Paul’s writing that he was either violent personally, or encouraged physical violence against adversaries. It is unlikely that Paul’s conversion would have radically changed his behavioural patterns with respect to advocating or orchestrating the use of violence. Paul’s hostility would have been verbal and confined to denunciations of opponents.
What Did Paul Believe about Jesus prior to Conversion ?
Paul was a hellenized Jew, who was born and lived in the Diaspora likely all his life. His social status was middle class, probably on the lower end of the middle. By Luke’s account he made a living as a tentmaker (σκηνοποιoς – Acts 18:3). Paul’s education is an unknown variable to most NT scholars, as Luke’s account of him as a disciple of Gemaliel (Acts 22:3) is best set aside as a story-teller’s license. For one, Saul’s blood lust against the Jesus sect that Luke swore by, would have been at odds with the teachings of Gemaliel and rabbinism generally. Nor is there in Paul a discernible trace of formal education, obtained through a public gymnasium or a private παιδαγωγος. Paul does not concern himself in the least with Greek philosophy even though the apostle certainly looks like someone keenly aware of his superior intellect, one with high intellectual ambitions, and one none too shy to display his learning. I am persuaded by an echo of the familiar tune of Frank Sinatra omnipresent in Paul letters, that their writer was self-sufficient in everything. As he apparently did it (all) his way, he would have been also self-educated.
As Paul was highly intelligent he would have easily dominated in most social settings where he put appearance. His learning and literacy would have been considered a mark of superiority in the circles he moved, regardless of pedigree. In this connection, one needs also to take into account the new situation that the translation of the Tanakh into Greek created. The Septuagint would have an effect similar to that of the Bible in the Middle Ages appearing in native languages of the European continent. The wider availability of the scripture meant that it could no longer be claimed by a small class of scribes and interpreters. It would have been accessible to bright urban autodidacts like Paul and his social milieu. ( Paul’s later missionary focus on the Gentiles interested in Judaism, would have also assured Paul’s supremacy as only the Jewish sages learned in the scripture would have been in a position to challenge Paul’s reading of the texts. And no doubt they would have found Paul outrageous. Start with the passages of non-titular Lord that the mystagogue abducted to make them seem to refer to his visions of a heavenly Redeemer.)
What Paul’s theology was prior to conversion is difficult to gauge. We may assume that he was conservative, and tending to a pietist variety of the faith. Paul’s manner also makes it quite probable that the ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude, so often present in his letters would have been a character trait preceding Paul’s career as an apostle of Christ. This Paul presumably did not have a friendly disposition to the missions of apocalyptic messianists from Jerusalem that he was encountering. He would have regarded the ecstatics, their ways and their beliefs them as plainly crazy (1 Cr 11:23, 14:23).
We are told by Paul that he once regarded Christ κατα σαρκα, i.e. from a vulgar point of view (2 Cr 5:16), which means he knew of Jesus from ordinary communication with other humans prior to receiving his revelation. This interpretation and the other apparently direct link to Jesus of the Nazarenes (1 Cr 2:2) was challenged by Earl Doherty on one of the discussion Boards. He stated that Paul’s adversaries believed in another version of the Christ myth, in which Jesus was not crucified. Unfortunately, he was not able to explain how Paul could have claimed that the Nazarene missions wanted to avoid persecution for the cross of Christ (Gal 6:12), if this cross was of a non-earthly origin. If the crucifixion was mythical and everyone knew it, then Paul’s injuction ‘will know nothing among you, other than Jesus Christ and him crucified’ equals in significance a taboo on discussing the deeds of Prometheus prior to his liver getting pecked out. Far worse though, accusing Cephas and his mission of fear of being persecuted for something they did not believe existed, would have reduced Paul’s apostolic reach only to the most destitute among the intellectual paupers.
Paul’s pre-conversion view of Jesus, κατα σαρκα, is summarized by 1 Cr 1:23 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
Paul, the urbane Hellenist, simply would not have accepted the proclamation of a prophet who was crucified by authorities as a criminal. It would have been folly to him. Why would God want to choose some illiterate Galilean peasant to incite a riot about the coming kingdom ? Besides, the authorities do not punish innocent people. In his conservatism, Paul could not even conceive of an unjust punishment (Rom 13:1-5). His view would have been seen as extreme even in his own time , but it is not one that is unparalleled in the history of religious thought. The Islamic theologian ibn Taymiyyah, who lived during the Mongol invasions of the Middle East, held similar opinions, saying famously that sixty years of tyrannical rule were preferable to one day of civil disorder.
Paul, the pious Jew, would have been outraged by the idolatry of the Nazarenes to an executed criminal proclaimed as a holy apostle of God (Hbr 3:1) and a martyr for his kingdom (Mt 23:37-39). This man was hanged on a tree (or the era’s equivalent punishment) and therefore demonstrated as one accursed of God. How could he become the heavenly intercessor for the coming of God`s kingdom ? The nomenclatura of the messianist sectaries would have no doubt offended Paul’s sense of righteousness cultivated by faithful observance of Jewish legalities and customs.
One final question on pre-conversion Paul concerns his own messianic expectations. I do not think they were strong, for a number of reasons. Paul had a tragic view of human existence which was not something brought about by his acquaintance with Christ. Much more likely it was the other way round. IMHO, it is unlikely that his belief that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cr 15:50, originated in the revelation of Christ. It looks rather an antithesis to the materialistic messianism which Paul had rejected. The Diaspora middle class that Paul counted himself in, would have been far removed from the popular clamour for a ‘shepherd king’ a la David, to restore Israel as sovereign kingdom, free of injustice and oppression. Its focus would have been on the local community, with whatever temporal issues it faced. A few prosperous Diaspora Jews would have been overwhelmed by eschatological speculations. Similarly the intellectuals: Josephus, even though a proud Jewish patriot, would not have seen the rise of a restored kingdom of Israel, as displacing Rome’s power in its vicinity. Rome’s emperor would have done fine as messiah. Philo’s primary interest lied in the integration of Jewish monotheism into the overwhelming influence of the Greco-Roman civilization. His interest lied squarely in marrying the Jewish wisdom traditions to Greek philosophy, an interest which was alien to the messianist vistas of a restored kingdom. The reality of Rome’s power was driven home to all Jewish intellectuals who were familiar with it. Only a few harboured hopes for a supernatural intervention by God, in making it all happen. Paul would not have been among them.
The Ecstatic Experience as Conversion
The wide acceptance of the road to Damascus incident as real history has had one interesting side effect. Paul has been classed as an epileptic, almost universally. This is not a modern view of Paul. Epilepsy has been called St.Paul’s Disease in Ireland for centuries. No doubt, the photism and collapse of Paul during the vision as described by Luke has led most to conclude that Paul suffered from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). This view is strengthened the story revealing that Paul, though blinded, was able to walk on his own. If Paul had suffered a stroke he would not have been able to walk far. Since TLE is known to produce strong religious conversion experiences, a little attention has been paid to Paul’s letters and the clues they provide as to his medical profile. In consequence, his assumed epilepsy has not been seriously challenged with the exception of those who caution that there is not really much to go on in a way of diagnosis. Despite the occasional disclaimer there has not been, to my knowledge, a serious interest from the medical professionals to assess Paul condition based on articulations he himself provides.
An historical review by D.Landsborough (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 1987:50) St.Paul and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy provides a fair example of how the assessments are done. Paul’s personal data are lifted from the Acts, and the composite sketch relies on such verities as his inheritance of Roman citizenship, and his formal education received in Jerusalem. He is said to be the 'first man of letters in the early church'. Paul’s self-described out-of-body journey to third heaven with the consequent attacks by Satan, is seen as bearing ‘a close resemblance to the psychic and perceptual resemblance of a temporal lobe seizure, albeit of spiritual experience for Paul’. The author cautions that we do not know whether Paul showed any abnormal physical signs. ‘If this was TLE it is very unlikely that there were – ‘the story is all’ ‘. He also cites C.H.Rieu assessment (Acts of the Apostles, Penguin 1957) of Paul as ‘a whirlwind of passions: ‘Hate, anger, depression, jostle with tenderness, love and hope, and all in extremes’. The essay goes on to mention Galatians (4:13-14) acknowledging Paul’s preaching of the gospel on account of illness. The apostle’s not being ‘despised’ for his condition is taken to mean he was free from being spat upon (morbus qui sputatur). Spitting can be described as a superstitious reaction by by-standers to an attack of epilepsy, though the article admits that the rude treatment was not necessarily specific to that disease.
In the analysis of 2 Cor 12:1-9, a number of indicators are seen as the artifact of a seizure, a disembodied state, aura of depersonalization, and inability to describe the experience are in the view of the author due to an ‘ intensely esoteric, rapturous state associated with an elaborate auditory sensation whose details cannot be recollected’. The writer believes that τη υπερβολυ των αποκαλυψεων (which his translation renders as 'wealth of visions') may bespeak of a number of experiences, which have a disagreeable sequel to them, described as a ‘thorn in the flesh’, and interpreted as recurring unpleasant motor disturbances. The latter is also seen as possible reference to the inner experience of a grand mal seizure. Generally, it is affirmed that the conversion, the recurrence of attacks and the nature of personality changes, which a quoted source describes as ‘inter-ictal’ such as ‘increased concern with, and writing on philosophical, moral and religious issues’, diminution of sexual activity, aggressiveness, are consistent with the diagnosis of TLE.
It is interesting to observe how easily Paul matches the epileptic profile in studies like these. There seem to be almost no counter-indications. Paul’s self-described illness and states of mind seem to fit seamlessly into the Damascus incident.
Yet, we do have the evidence of R.M.Bucke (see the preceding blog The Origin of My Interest…) , a trained physician who would immediately have recognized the epileptic nature of Paul’s visionary experience (as he would have known his own). Paul describes himself as glossolalic (1 Cr 14:18) and apparently insists that this activity be controlled when the church assembles. It is hard to credit that Paul would have attempted to regulate tongue speaking if this activity was spontaneous and beyond the control of the sufferers. He classes himself as a member of the spiritualist assembly. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…and all were made to drink of one Spirit (1 Cr 12:13). The metaphoric intoxication by the Spirit is an important diagnostic clue, as it permeates the texts (e.g. the marriage at Cana, in John 2, the mass baptism at the Pentecost, Acts 2, Thomas 13 & 108). At minimum, this suggests that Paul’s ecstatic seizures, or seizure-like symptoms, were triggered periodically by protracted episodes of euphoric excitement. If we read Paul’s prominent displays of moodiness in this context, the diagnostic profile will soon tilt to issues of loss of control of moods, and the letters can be read as almost classical self-describing exhibits of manic-depressive illness. (More on Paul’s bipolar challenge in a future blog).
Does 2 Cor 12:1-9 describe Paul’s Conversion ?
As I have indicated already, there is a significant difference between the conversion experience as portrayed by Luke in Acts 9, and Paul’s own testimony in Gal 1:15-16. God called Paul through his grace and was pleased to reveal his Son in Paul. Some textual commentators say that the phrase οτε δε ευδοκησεν ο θεος, (but when God was pleased) is a later addition. If it is not, it shows Paul misallocating his affective tie to the event, projecting it as God’s feelings. At any rate, the phrasing shows that the revelation was received as a positive and ennobling transport by Paul contrasting sharply with the assault on, and abduction of, Saul by vengeful Jesus on the road to Damascus.
Gal 1:15-16 seems to be elaborated by 2 Cor 12:1-9:
1) I must boast; there is nothing to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord.
The lead-in verse is important in that it should take care of exegetical objections that what follows may not be the description of the inaugural Paul’s revelation of Christ. With this verse, it is really difficult to see why Paul should would omit reference to his first revelatory experience, if the preceding defence of his apostolic status vis-à-vis competition is not strong enough argument.
2) I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.
Paul switches here to the third person singular to stress both the unreality of what he experienced and the loss of self in the euphoric ascent. It is also important to grasp Paul’s relating himself as in Christ even after all these years - which is to stress the lasting effect the conversion had.
3) And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—
4) and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.
Reaching a euphoric peak (the paradise), Paul could not distinguish between internal and external stimuli. The gnosis imparted was not permissible to speak about – although the question arises whether by this manoeuvre Paul seeks to convey the lack of communicability of the inner state brought about by sustained mental excitement.
5) On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.
6) Though if I wish to boast, I shall not be a fool, for I shall be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me.
Paul asserts that he – as a mature individual with a sense of identity – has no claim on the theophany. This connects with Paul’s description of the son revealed in him (εν εμοι) in Gal 1:15. Paul observes this protocol in his letters distinguishing his personal view and the commands or revelations of the Lord. The border however becomes blurred as Paul seems to appropriate the mind of Christ (υμεις δε νουν Χριστου εχομεν – 1 Cr 2:16) for his group, and sees himself as the unchallengeable spokesman for it (Gal 5:10, Rom 2:16, Rom 16:25).
7) And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.
Even though the thorn in the flesh (σκoλοψ τη σαρκι) does not specify the nature of the discomfort it is clear that in Paul’s mind it reduces the grandiose inflation of self-esteem which characterizes the initial phase of the transport, through torment and physical suffering. This is a most significant disclosure of Paul, as it captures the counter polarity to his euphoria, and grasps its function in returning Paul to reality.
8) Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me;9) but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
Verses 8-9 confirm the cyclical nature of the process. Paul goes up to the pinnacle of euphoria where he is showered with glorious revelations and is brought down each time into decrepitude through a painful manifold of persecutory calamities (for an inventory see 2 Cr 11:23-33). To protect his ego from becoming too damaged in the falls from grace, he disengages himself from the glorious heights and assigns them to the risen Lord, of whose glory he is sent to testify.
I have found through many years of discussions most people seem reluctant to accept that 2 Cor 12:1-9 describes Paul’s visions and revelations (ὀπτασίας καὶ ἀποκαλύψεις) of the Lord. Even though Paul tells them it does, their upbringing and schooling makes them look subconsciously for an event resembling the road to Damascus. It is not there, ergo it cannot be the conversion experience ! I had a discussion on this with a very intelligent and knowledgeable historian of antiquity. He said he was not convinced that 2 Cor 12:2 describes the inaugural revelation of Christ to Paul. I asked him what reason Paul would have to omit the most important event of all, given the context of the defence of his ministry, in which the account was given. Why would he hold back ? He did not know. I suggested that the scepticism was simply an ingrained habit of thought which seeks to connect Paul’s letters to the Acts. He said 'maybe'. But it appears there was no Saul on the road to Damascus. It is a literary, fictional adaptation of Paul’s onset of acute bipolarity, in which he began to experience the Spirit (as described in The Doctor Who Could not Heal Himself – July 2010).
How did Paul connect his experience to the Nazarene Jesus ?
This is probably the question of all questions. My view is this: Paul was doubtless shaken up by the experience once his first episode was over. We do not know whether he had at the beginning of his experience of boundless euphoria some discussions, agonized arguments, or thoughts on the subject which then carried on into the episode. It is most likely however that Paul became preoccupied with Jesus during the protracted period of agitation (the mean duration of hypermanic excitement is about six weeks) , and as it progressed in stages to mind-states totally unfamiliar to Paul, he began to ascribe the uncanny joy to the Jesus entity. This continued through the terrifying, persecutory stage of the episode, which Paul came to associate with Jesus’ death on the cross. It was no cheap metaphor. Eric Kraepelin, the German psychiatrist who defined the manic-depressive disorder, wrote ‘very commonly it is asserted that the disease is a greater torture than any other, that the patient would far, far rather endure any bodily pain than disorder of the mind’. (E. Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, tr. By Mary Barclay, Edinburgh, 1921, p.22).
Coming out of the episode, a part of which was hugely exhilarating but which then morphed into a nightmare of living hell, Paul must have been scared stiff. He realized how totally defenceless he was in his madness , and he would have defined his behaviour as such once he regained his faculties. He was now like the ecstatic freaks which he previously despised.
Reflecting on his own states of non-compos mentis and physical afflictions after the mystical peaks, he paralleled them with the reports of Jesus' sayings and doings, and decided that the earthly Jesus was "led" by the same spirit as he, Paul, was and that he followed the spirit as it led him inexorably to the cross. The kingdom Jesus believed could be brought to earth from heaven by God in the messianic age (as Paul received it through the grapevine from the disciples' following) were delusions, but delusions planted by God (2 Cr 5:21). Paul reasoned that if Jesus was deluded by God and crucified because he, in his delusions was made to break the Mosaic law, then his death could not signify but the absurdity of human life. But if Jesus' death had a hidden meaning, and his apparent madness that caused his violent end was actually designed by God to show Paul (and through Paul) that Jesus' and Paul's own madness was not what it seemed to others then there was hope. If the delusions of grandeur, were actually how God worked and the ecstatic peaks of pleasure and fulfilment a revelatory preview of the life in Jesus Christ that comes after one has faithfully served God, then Paul was not mad and Jesus was Lord. If Paul could dissociate his ego from the grandeur he was experiencing he would retain a measure of sanity and win salvation by proclaiming the glory as Christ's. Whatever else can one say of Paul, he convinced enough fellow pneumatics of his and their special commission, and they in turn found enough following in their communities for it, that they built a solid believer base. That base was Paul's proof that he had seen the Lord.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The Origin of My Interest in Early Christian Psychology
If you read my blogged essays in sequence, you have probably guessed by now that I live with a bipolar challenge myself. My interest in the early Christians relates to my first hypermanic episode I had at the age of thirty-seven. During my recovery, still hanging onto some delusional schemes, one of the things I could not get my head around was the quasi-religious content of much of the phantasms during the two months that I was out of service. The auto-suggestions, which now looked idiotic and frightening to my intellect, because surely I was out of control, came seemingly out of nowhere. I was religion-free. Prior to the transport, I had no history either of involvement with a church or intellectual interest in religious texts. Throughout my life I have been a voracious reader, in history, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and good fiction. Before the onset of acute bipolarity I did not read in religious studies. Other than the Bible, which I read with Isaac Asimov’s ‘Guide’ as a historical document, maybe the only two authors that had remotely to do with religious ideas were T.D. Suzuki and Alan Watts. Oh yes, one more. Once, when I forgot to pack a book or two to read on a 6-hour flight I picked up ‘Holy Blood Holy Grail’ in an airport bookstore. It looked like the only eligible title among the Harlequins, Micheners, Get-Rich-Quick-manuals, Hollywood biographies, diet scams and other assorted trash. Actually, I don’t know why went for the Baigent crew title. Maybe because it was a bestseller; maybe because I thought it was a comedy like Monty Python’s.
After my episode, I saw four psychiatrists. None of them wanted to discuss anything that was important to me. I had the strangest bodily feelings during the episode; at one point, during the peak of the euphoric excitement my body filled with light and dissolved, as it were; it was the most incredible thing I ever experienced. I wanted to remember that state. I was afraid of losing the memory of being like that. That fear was as strong as that of reliving the horrors the brain produced after the sea of light that poured into my body out of nowhere. One of the shrinks I saw said he could not help me with that. (Actually, he could have by explaining to me terms like 'photism' and 'synaesthesia'.) He told me that whatever I thought and felt during the feverish days was not at all important. ‘You will acknowledge it yourself once you get better’, he said. Get better ?, I thought, ….bud, you wouldn’t listen but have come down from getting the best. I have seen the world to come. What do you think you can give me to help me get better?? The idea that I could be restored by a cocktail of poisons to myself – not just to some sad joke of me as a briefcase-toting executive zombie - was absurd. It was more absurd than that God himself sent a Spirit to save the world from destroying itself, and then left me to witness its collapse, after being jeered at, spat upon and flogged by everyone’s stupid ego, including my own, and leaving me to my own devices to deal with the shame and confusion, in the aftermath.
I felt I needed to hang on. Hang on to whatever it was that hit. In the deepest recesses of me I felt there was something in that sudden shattering of the world I thought I knew. I was still crazy as a bedbug. Even after I cleaned my place of the witness of my phantasms, I wanted to remember everything. I believed. I had to believe this was not just a random thing, not just the creepy idiocies which appear as soon as you open your mouth about your visions or try to put them down on paper. There's got be some sense in this nonsense.
I remember one of those dreadful panic attacks that threatened to kill me in those weeks. An indescribable fear descended on me and sent me into a frenzy. I was walking past a bookstore when another huge premonition of the End arrived. I stumbled in and fighting the paralysis the fear sent into my limbs I started to pull out books at random from a shelf. Then my eyes fell on Susan Sonntag’s I, etcetera. Trying to steady my shaking hand, I parsed the sleeve. There was a quote from Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Immediately relieved and resolved to find strength to live through the terror and the perplex, I walked out of the store with the prized promise. A few steps down the street a store clerk caught up with me: ‘are you going to pay for the book ?’ Here is a confession: for a long time I believed that I was actually led to enter the store to find the relief in on the sleeve of that particular book. Yet, it was the paranoid thought process insisting that reality was being pre-arranged with myself as a focal point of God’s attention that not only sent me into paroxysms of terror but also provided the relief and the growing confidence that I can cope with my predicament and cope without drugs. Strange mess I was in. A few days later while taking bath I suddenly realized that Nietzsche, for all his wisdom, ended up in a lunatic asylum. I jumped out of the water. For ten minutes of eternity I could not find my breath.
The last of the psychiatrists to whom I was referred after the initial diagnosis at a clinic near Montreal General, was actually a likeable fellow. I will call him Dennis here. In his forties, tall and balding, he had a cheerful disposition. He knew how to turn on a confident grin, which I am sure, was disarming to most of his female patients. ‘So, you are a computer programmer’, he grinned after he’s taken down my story, ‘got the bug, worked nights and could not sleep…waking up in the middle of the night with some bright new coding solution to an intractable problem, eh….then went kind of depressed and couldn’t get it up, ….and then had a mystical experience,… who was in it ? Boddhisatva ? Come here, I’ll show you something…’. He launched from his swivel chair and opened up a drawer of one of his filing cabinets. ‘Oh come, come , you want to see this!’ I got up, and he began rifling through his files. ‘Here’s one,’ he said and pulled up a folder half way. ‘Don’t look at the name tags, I am trusting you….another one……m m m m, where are they ? Here my friend is another..here and here and here.... These are my programmers, all of them. Call it the hazard of the profession. They gave me pretty much the same story as you did, they got the bug, forgot to nap and their brain chemicals went out of whack. No problem, we know how to fix that’. Dennis pushed down the folders, theatrically slammed the metal drawer, and seated himself breaking eye contact.
I sat down and said, ‘Jesus’. ‘Sorry, what was that ?’, asked Dennis who was jotting something important into my file. ‘You asked me who was in my mystical experience’, I said. ‘Yes, yes, of course !’, he finished writing and started explaining that these things, (the mystical experiences which some manics have), are culturally conditioned. People who are Christians will have Jesus in them, Jews their prophet of choice, Buddhists Buddha, Moslems he never treated but he felt sure they had Mohammed in them. ‘But I am not religious,… normally’, I countered, but already began to mess things up. A debate ensued in which Dennis determined that my mother was a Catholic like his, and therefore I had somewhere in my head stored up the Jesus lore from my childhood, which bubbled up during the episode of excitement. ‘Did you actually see Jesus ?’, Dennis asked with what felt like a sly intent. I resented the patronizing tone, and his utter lack of ability to connect on a human level with whatever it was that made me come to him. The same thing as with the other shrinks. ‘No it was not like seeing a person’, I was perplexed again, trying to explain my exile from right reason, ‘it’s nothing like that. It’s more like a strange presence that kind of gets hold of you’. Dennis went on poking: ‘well did this presence which you say was Jesus, …did it talk to you ? Did you hear his voice ? Again, I tried to assure him that I did not hallucinate a color print of a blond-hair guy with a nimbus around his head, a lamb in his arms, and a puzzled facial expression. Not that. I remembered having both visual and auditory hallucinations during the episode. Jesus was not in them. After a few days of excitement , I sometimes felt I was awake and dreaming at the same time. I tried to explain the in-and-out somnambulist state into which I had sank in place of the normal cycle of sleep and wakefulness, and how unreal it felt. It was like being in another world. But Dennis was not into it. He assured himself that Jesus left my skull, leaving my cognitive gear relatively intact. He asked me if I lost any weight. I told him I lost a lot through the two months of the ecstatic ordeal, but that I was more less eating normally now. How much is a lot ? Twenty pounds ? Dennis raised his eyebrows. Well, I replied, I haven’t weighed myself but all my clothing seems three sizes bigger, and I still forget to eat at times. ‘Forget,… you still forget’, he muttered back. He shook his head sizing me as post-psychotic but still quite vulnerable . A mood stabilizing medication was in his opinion necessary. I looked depressed to him. My response was that I was going to think about it. When I saw him next time he was displeased with my decision and said he really could not do much for me.
Many years later, I recalled my difficulty in giving Dennis a coherent account of the headspace which at the time freely associated my strange and different way of interacting with the world with the name Jesus. In a book comparing the experiences of the prophet Mohammed and Teresa of Avila (Maxine Rodinson: Mohammed) the Carmelite nun was asked by her confessor to explain her visions. She said she sees nothing during her mystical union with Christ. 'Since you see nothing', asked her confessor incredulously, 'how do you know it is Our Lord' ? She replied that she saw no face, that she knew it was Our Lord and it was not an illusion....'one sees nothing, within or without...but while seeing nothing the soul understands what it is and where it is more clearly than if you saw him....The soul hears no word, either within or without, but understands quite clearly who it is and where he is and sometimes even what he means to tell. How and by what means [the soul] understands, it does not know, but so it is; and while this is happening it cannot fail to know it'
The Psychiatrist Who Helped
Finally, I did find a psychiatrist who answered many of my questions. He was from Montreal, which was coincidence I took as one of those confirmations there was some kind of Providential plan in all of my psycho extracurriculars. Actually, doctor Bucke was dead at the time I contacted him, having slipped on ice and succumbed to his brain injury back in 1902, many years before my own little brain figured out how the wet breast connected to the cooing noises above . It was Richard Maurice Bucke’s seminal work ‘Cosmic Consciousness’ which was the lithium I was looking for. Dr. Bucke believed that human mind was fast evolving, and that the great mystical experiences of such religious founders as Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and great minds like Dante, Francis Bacon (who he believed wrote the Shakespeare plays and poems), Blaise Pascal, Spinoza, William Blake, Swedenborg, Diderot, as well as many of Bucke’s contemporaries, had the advance spiritual faculty which manifested itself as a sort of peak experience of cosmic gnosis, which eventually will be made available to the masses at large.
The book helped to put me on the right track. First, of course, I was greatly relieved I was not judged insane by this doctor. He evidently did not think me too conceited in claiming I had Cosmic Consciousness since, evidently this thing was now made available to fairly ordinary eccentrics like myself. Some people may shake their heads on reading this, but they do not realize how important it is to someone who had the familiarity of the frightful thing of falling into the hands of the living God (Hbr 10:31). One is looking to find a workable external view to make sense of the experience. It just won’t do to say, ‘ don’t worry about it, take the meds and you will be ok. Think of it just like any other illness.’ Because, it is not like any other illness – this one is about who you are, and how you feel about yourself, and how people react socially to what you supply to them as your self-image. You need to integrate this experience because you own it: it is yours to figure out, because if you don't it will figure you out. Just like Thomas said in his gospel: Blessed the lion whom the man eats for the man will be like a lion, and cursed the man whom the lion eats for the lion will be like a man. (IOW, if you master the experience of madness, you will be empowered by it, but if it allow it to overtake you, you will be reduced to beastliness).
Bucke wrote: ‘it seems that every, or nearly every, man who enters into cosmic consciousness apprehension is at first more or less excited; the person doubting whether the new sense may not be a symptom or form of insanity. Mohammed was greatly alarmed. I think it is clear that Paul was, and others to be mentioned further were similarly affected’. Bucke uncompromisingly endorsed the experience of cosmic consciousness: ‘the masters taught by it, and the rest of the world by them through their books , followers and disciples, so that id what is here called a form of insanity, we are confronted by the terrible fact (were it not an absurdity) that our civilisation, including all our highest religions, rest on delusions.’
Naturally, today I can tell you that Bucke’s ideas are dated, and that he as a psychiatrist was behind in the study of what in his time was known as ‘circular insanity’. (as discussed e.g. by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, which came out some six years before Bucke’s book. ) They more or less follow the intellectual preoccupation of his time in which nearly everyone believed in eugenics as a way of improving the lot of humanity. This was as true of the racial theories on the Right, that spawned Hitler’s tutors like Count Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, as of the communist Nirvana on the Left. Trotsky famously promised that socialism would breed, in a few generations, men with the body of Spartacus and the mind of Aristotle. But I would not be able to tell you all that, if I did not find someone or a scripture, i.e. a book in which I placed confidence when I was vulnerable because it could manage the unexplainable. And R.M. Bucke’s compilation was just that scripture for my recovery. Doctor Bucke’s most famous charge was Walt Whitman, who was both a patient and a family friend who on occasion lived with the doctor's family in his home. Whitman said he owed the doctor his life. To the doctor, Whitman was the most shining example of cosmic consciousness he encountered. Today, one of the foremost contemporary experts on the Bipolar Disorder Kay Redfield Jamison (herself a sufferer) classes Whitman as one of those ‘Touched With Fire’ of mania.
The Beginning of my Quest for Illness as a Hobby
I actually said that once. Someone asked me once if I was questing for another historical Jesus. I said, ‘far from, if I am questing for anything then it is to convert my illness into a hobby’. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness inspired me to extend my reading to books on mysticism, occult and religion. I started to get more focused on Christianity, around 1988. On rereading the New Testament that year, I noted a great number of interesting, uncanny, parallels between the symptoms of manic-depression and some of the happenings in the gospels. I kept tending to my mules (computers) while researching, but I had another episode in my first winter in Ottawa 1989, after the company I worked for as a divisional IT manager was sold and I was let go. The second hypermanic high was actually much more benign than the first one and had very little of the dreadful terrors I had experienced the first time. I came out of it without depression: on the contrary I felt quite confident, quit smoking cold turkey, got into tennis and running, and started to date again (He who is able to receive this, let him receive it). Jesus agreed to be put on the back burner, as I married, had two kids and suddenly found myself with a lot of other stuff to do. I more or less made vague plans to return to my hobby seriously once I retired.
On a trip back to Montreal in the nineties, I ran into Lyn, a friend of my neighbour who knew me at the time I screamed of the coming mayhem in the streets and smelled of urine. She seemed genuinely surprised and kept glancing to my right during the first few words of greeting. “What a beautiful little girl,” she exclaimed about my precious Tamy in tow, “ how old is she ? four?, ah what a cutie you are , is she yours ?”. When she received an answer in the affirmative, she seemed to struggle with the next query that overwhelmed her. It didn’t take a mystic to figure out what she was thinking. “So the thing you had, it’s ok now…right ?.... I hope. ”. Lyn, I remembered, was not exactly shy when working on her sensational reports to friends. I pretended I did not understand: “What thing is ok ?” . She just could not help it: “well you know, Jiri, the imbalance you had when you lived in the house above Louise”. I suspected this was still an unsettled account with my former friends. Whenever I met them, I could tell the brutality of my initiation into mysticism was still haunting them. “Oh that Lyn,… that thing settled itself a long time ago”, I smiled and as she sighed a sigh of relief, I turned to Tamy and putting on quickly the grimace of the lutin méchant she so loved , I sang with a runaway pitch: ‘Naaaaaaw, daaaddy’s still nuuutty as a fruuuitcake”.
After my episode, I saw four psychiatrists. None of them wanted to discuss anything that was important to me. I had the strangest bodily feelings during the episode; at one point, during the peak of the euphoric excitement my body filled with light and dissolved, as it were; it was the most incredible thing I ever experienced. I wanted to remember that state. I was afraid of losing the memory of being like that. That fear was as strong as that of reliving the horrors the brain produced after the sea of light that poured into my body out of nowhere. One of the shrinks I saw said he could not help me with that. (Actually, he could have by explaining to me terms like 'photism' and 'synaesthesia'.) He told me that whatever I thought and felt during the feverish days was not at all important. ‘You will acknowledge it yourself once you get better’, he said. Get better ?, I thought, ….bud, you wouldn’t listen but have come down from getting the best. I have seen the world to come. What do you think you can give me to help me get better?? The idea that I could be restored by a cocktail of poisons to myself – not just to some sad joke of me as a briefcase-toting executive zombie - was absurd. It was more absurd than that God himself sent a Spirit to save the world from destroying itself, and then left me to witness its collapse, after being jeered at, spat upon and flogged by everyone’s stupid ego, including my own, and leaving me to my own devices to deal with the shame and confusion, in the aftermath.
I felt I needed to hang on. Hang on to whatever it was that hit. In the deepest recesses of me I felt there was something in that sudden shattering of the world I thought I knew. I was still crazy as a bedbug. Even after I cleaned my place of the witness of my phantasms, I wanted to remember everything. I believed. I had to believe this was not just a random thing, not just the creepy idiocies which appear as soon as you open your mouth about your visions or try to put them down on paper. There's got be some sense in this nonsense.
I remember one of those dreadful panic attacks that threatened to kill me in those weeks. An indescribable fear descended on me and sent me into a frenzy. I was walking past a bookstore when another huge premonition of the End arrived. I stumbled in and fighting the paralysis the fear sent into my limbs I started to pull out books at random from a shelf. Then my eyes fell on Susan Sonntag’s I, etcetera. Trying to steady my shaking hand, I parsed the sleeve. There was a quote from Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Immediately relieved and resolved to find strength to live through the terror and the perplex, I walked out of the store with the prized promise. A few steps down the street a store clerk caught up with me: ‘are you going to pay for the book ?’ Here is a confession: for a long time I believed that I was actually led to enter the store to find the relief in on the sleeve of that particular book. Yet, it was the paranoid thought process insisting that reality was being pre-arranged with myself as a focal point of God’s attention that not only sent me into paroxysms of terror but also provided the relief and the growing confidence that I can cope with my predicament and cope without drugs. Strange mess I was in. A few days later while taking bath I suddenly realized that Nietzsche, for all his wisdom, ended up in a lunatic asylum. I jumped out of the water. For ten minutes of eternity I could not find my breath.
The last of the psychiatrists to whom I was referred after the initial diagnosis at a clinic near Montreal General, was actually a likeable fellow. I will call him Dennis here. In his forties, tall and balding, he had a cheerful disposition. He knew how to turn on a confident grin, which I am sure, was disarming to most of his female patients. ‘So, you are a computer programmer’, he grinned after he’s taken down my story, ‘got the bug, worked nights and could not sleep…waking up in the middle of the night with some bright new coding solution to an intractable problem, eh….then went kind of depressed and couldn’t get it up, ….and then had a mystical experience,… who was in it ? Boddhisatva ? Come here, I’ll show you something…’. He launched from his swivel chair and opened up a drawer of one of his filing cabinets. ‘Oh come, come , you want to see this!’ I got up, and he began rifling through his files. ‘Here’s one,’ he said and pulled up a folder half way. ‘Don’t look at the name tags, I am trusting you….another one……m m m m, where are they ? Here my friend is another..here and here and here.... These are my programmers, all of them. Call it the hazard of the profession. They gave me pretty much the same story as you did, they got the bug, forgot to nap and their brain chemicals went out of whack. No problem, we know how to fix that’. Dennis pushed down the folders, theatrically slammed the metal drawer, and seated himself breaking eye contact.
I sat down and said, ‘Jesus’. ‘Sorry, what was that ?’, asked Dennis who was jotting something important into my file. ‘You asked me who was in my mystical experience’, I said. ‘Yes, yes, of course !’, he finished writing and started explaining that these things, (the mystical experiences which some manics have), are culturally conditioned. People who are Christians will have Jesus in them, Jews their prophet of choice, Buddhists Buddha, Moslems he never treated but he felt sure they had Mohammed in them. ‘But I am not religious,… normally’, I countered, but already began to mess things up. A debate ensued in which Dennis determined that my mother was a Catholic like his, and therefore I had somewhere in my head stored up the Jesus lore from my childhood, which bubbled up during the episode of excitement. ‘Did you actually see Jesus ?’, Dennis asked with what felt like a sly intent. I resented the patronizing tone, and his utter lack of ability to connect on a human level with whatever it was that made me come to him. The same thing as with the other shrinks. ‘No it was not like seeing a person’, I was perplexed again, trying to explain my exile from right reason, ‘it’s nothing like that. It’s more like a strange presence that kind of gets hold of you’. Dennis went on poking: ‘well did this presence which you say was Jesus, …did it talk to you ? Did you hear his voice ? Again, I tried to assure him that I did not hallucinate a color print of a blond-hair guy with a nimbus around his head, a lamb in his arms, and a puzzled facial expression. Not that. I remembered having both visual and auditory hallucinations during the episode. Jesus was not in them. After a few days of excitement , I sometimes felt I was awake and dreaming at the same time. I tried to explain the in-and-out somnambulist state into which I had sank in place of the normal cycle of sleep and wakefulness, and how unreal it felt. It was like being in another world. But Dennis was not into it. He assured himself that Jesus left my skull, leaving my cognitive gear relatively intact. He asked me if I lost any weight. I told him I lost a lot through the two months of the ecstatic ordeal, but that I was more less eating normally now. How much is a lot ? Twenty pounds ? Dennis raised his eyebrows. Well, I replied, I haven’t weighed myself but all my clothing seems three sizes bigger, and I still forget to eat at times. ‘Forget,… you still forget’, he muttered back. He shook his head sizing me as post-psychotic but still quite vulnerable . A mood stabilizing medication was in his opinion necessary. I looked depressed to him. My response was that I was going to think about it. When I saw him next time he was displeased with my decision and said he really could not do much for me.
Many years later, I recalled my difficulty in giving Dennis a coherent account of the headspace which at the time freely associated my strange and different way of interacting with the world with the name Jesus. In a book comparing the experiences of the prophet Mohammed and Teresa of Avila (Maxine Rodinson: Mohammed) the Carmelite nun was asked by her confessor to explain her visions. She said she sees nothing during her mystical union with Christ. 'Since you see nothing', asked her confessor incredulously, 'how do you know it is Our Lord' ? She replied that she saw no face, that she knew it was Our Lord and it was not an illusion....'one sees nothing, within or without...but while seeing nothing the soul understands what it is and where it is more clearly than if you saw him....The soul hears no word, either within or without, but understands quite clearly who it is and where he is and sometimes even what he means to tell. How and by what means [the soul] understands, it does not know, but so it is; and while this is happening it cannot fail to know it'
The Psychiatrist Who Helped
Finally, I did find a psychiatrist who answered many of my questions. He was from Montreal, which was coincidence I took as one of those confirmations there was some kind of Providential plan in all of my psycho extracurriculars. Actually, doctor Bucke was dead at the time I contacted him, having slipped on ice and succumbed to his brain injury back in 1902, many years before my own little brain figured out how the wet breast connected to the cooing noises above . It was Richard Maurice Bucke’s seminal work ‘Cosmic Consciousness’ which was the lithium I was looking for. Dr. Bucke believed that human mind was fast evolving, and that the great mystical experiences of such religious founders as Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and great minds like Dante, Francis Bacon (who he believed wrote the Shakespeare plays and poems), Blaise Pascal, Spinoza, William Blake, Swedenborg, Diderot, as well as many of Bucke’s contemporaries, had the advance spiritual faculty which manifested itself as a sort of peak experience of cosmic gnosis, which eventually will be made available to the masses at large.
The book helped to put me on the right track. First, of course, I was greatly relieved I was not judged insane by this doctor. He evidently did not think me too conceited in claiming I had Cosmic Consciousness since, evidently this thing was now made available to fairly ordinary eccentrics like myself. Some people may shake their heads on reading this, but they do not realize how important it is to someone who had the familiarity of the frightful thing of falling into the hands of the living God (Hbr 10:31). One is looking to find a workable external view to make sense of the experience. It just won’t do to say, ‘ don’t worry about it, take the meds and you will be ok. Think of it just like any other illness.’ Because, it is not like any other illness – this one is about who you are, and how you feel about yourself, and how people react socially to what you supply to them as your self-image. You need to integrate this experience because you own it: it is yours to figure out, because if you don't it will figure you out. Just like Thomas said in his gospel: Blessed the lion whom the man eats for the man will be like a lion, and cursed the man whom the lion eats for the lion will be like a man. (IOW, if you master the experience of madness, you will be empowered by it, but if it allow it to overtake you, you will be reduced to beastliness).
Bucke wrote: ‘it seems that every, or nearly every, man who enters into cosmic consciousness apprehension is at first more or less excited; the person doubting whether the new sense may not be a symptom or form of insanity. Mohammed was greatly alarmed. I think it is clear that Paul was, and others to be mentioned further were similarly affected’. Bucke uncompromisingly endorsed the experience of cosmic consciousness: ‘the masters taught by it, and the rest of the world by them through their books , followers and disciples, so that id what is here called a form of insanity, we are confronted by the terrible fact (were it not an absurdity) that our civilisation, including all our highest religions, rest on delusions.’
Naturally, today I can tell you that Bucke’s ideas are dated, and that he as a psychiatrist was behind in the study of what in his time was known as ‘circular insanity’. (as discussed e.g. by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, which came out some six years before Bucke’s book. ) They more or less follow the intellectual preoccupation of his time in which nearly everyone believed in eugenics as a way of improving the lot of humanity. This was as true of the racial theories on the Right, that spawned Hitler’s tutors like Count Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, as of the communist Nirvana on the Left. Trotsky famously promised that socialism would breed, in a few generations, men with the body of Spartacus and the mind of Aristotle. But I would not be able to tell you all that, if I did not find someone or a scripture, i.e. a book in which I placed confidence when I was vulnerable because it could manage the unexplainable. And R.M. Bucke’s compilation was just that scripture for my recovery. Doctor Bucke’s most famous charge was Walt Whitman, who was both a patient and a family friend who on occasion lived with the doctor's family in his home. Whitman said he owed the doctor his life. To the doctor, Whitman was the most shining example of cosmic consciousness he encountered. Today, one of the foremost contemporary experts on the Bipolar Disorder Kay Redfield Jamison (herself a sufferer) classes Whitman as one of those ‘Touched With Fire’ of mania.
The Beginning of my Quest for Illness as a Hobby
I actually said that once. Someone asked me once if I was questing for another historical Jesus. I said, ‘far from, if I am questing for anything then it is to convert my illness into a hobby’. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness inspired me to extend my reading to books on mysticism, occult and religion. I started to get more focused on Christianity, around 1988. On rereading the New Testament that year, I noted a great number of interesting, uncanny, parallels between the symptoms of manic-depression and some of the happenings in the gospels. I kept tending to my mules (computers) while researching, but I had another episode in my first winter in Ottawa 1989, after the company I worked for as a divisional IT manager was sold and I was let go. The second hypermanic high was actually much more benign than the first one and had very little of the dreadful terrors I had experienced the first time. I came out of it without depression: on the contrary I felt quite confident, quit smoking cold turkey, got into tennis and running, and started to date again (He who is able to receive this, let him receive it). Jesus agreed to be put on the back burner, as I married, had two kids and suddenly found myself with a lot of other stuff to do. I more or less made vague plans to return to my hobby seriously once I retired.
On a trip back to Montreal in the nineties, I ran into Lyn, a friend of my neighbour who knew me at the time I screamed of the coming mayhem in the streets and smelled of urine. She seemed genuinely surprised and kept glancing to my right during the first few words of greeting. “What a beautiful little girl,” she exclaimed about my precious Tamy in tow, “ how old is she ? four?, ah what a cutie you are , is she yours ?”. When she received an answer in the affirmative, she seemed to struggle with the next query that overwhelmed her. It didn’t take a mystic to figure out what she was thinking. “So the thing you had, it’s ok now…right ?.... I hope. ”. Lyn, I remembered, was not exactly shy when working on her sensational reports to friends. I pretended I did not understand: “What thing is ok ?” . She just could not help it: “well you know, Jiri, the imbalance you had when you lived in the house above Louise”. I suspected this was still an unsettled account with my former friends. Whenever I met them, I could tell the brutality of my initiation into mysticism was still haunting them. “Oh that Lyn,… that thing settled itself a long time ago”, I smiled and as she sighed a sigh of relief, I turned to Tamy and putting on quickly the grimace of the lutin méchant she so loved , I sang with a runaway pitch: ‘Naaaaaaw, daaaddy’s still nuuutty as a fruuuitcake”.
Friday, July 23, 2010
The Strange Case Of A Religion-Obsessed Atheist
NOTE: this essay was first posted on "infidels" in 2007. I am including it here to provide a general overview of my ideas and beliefs about beliefs:
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THE STRANGE CASE OF A RELIGION-OBSESSED ATHEIST
Review of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great.
If professing atheism is, as I believe, wishing upon the Impotent, then Christopher Hitchens’ newest book title is a muezzin’s call.. Normally, a book with a title God Is Not Great would leave me stone cold, as it connotes a buzz between the ears believing itself to be thought. But two things raised my eyebrow as I was pulling a copy off the shelf at Chapters. One, it was written by Hitchens who is not dumb and whose compulsive trashing can be on occasion witty. Two, as a student of religion, or rather the psychology thereof, I was immediately drawn by the rendering of the title, namely the insistence on the small case ‘g’ for the deity, which was faithfully carried on the back of the book and the frontispiece.
However, as I leafed through the volume, the nature of Hitchens’ religious problem seemed clear and self-evident. Christopher is terribly oppressed by religion the way forsworn bachelors are terribly oppressed by women. Religious folks won’t leave him alone. They are not just trying to seduce him, they want to ruin him. ‘People of faith’, writes the poor persecuted man, ‘are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard won human attainments…Religion poisons everything’.
The first observation a reasonable person, whatever his or her confession (or indifference to one), would make about such a statement is that it is hopelessly overstated. Hitchens does not live in Kabul or Peshawar, not even in Hillsboro, Tennessee. By a huge margin, people of faith do not plan anyone’s destruction. If hell is part of their eschatology, the lot of them leave the actual planning and execution to the Almighty. As they would have it, Mr Hitchens will go to hell because he has earned the passage. Most of today’s faithful do not express ill-will beyond that. Why there is a violent minority of religionists(which tends to swell at times), I will consider at a later point, but for now let me be as reassuring as I can be that it is a folly of clinical proportion to believe that religion causes passenger planes to crash into skyscrapers or high powered rifles to fire into abortion clinics.
Hitchens’ hopeless confusion about the object of his study reveals itself almost immediately. Religion kills, he states confidently in the title of chapter two. But if one proudly claims atheism as one’s personal creed, as Hitchens does, the statement has a way of contradicting itself. If religion is man-made (as he never tires to repeat) and God does not enter into his view of the universe, then something other than God causes (or better, ‘accounts for’) religion. If there is goodness and badness in humanity outside of God, for that which impels men to do good and bad things in the name of God, one cannot invoke or blame God (or religion) for things that are done mistakenly in his name or as his will. The point that loud atheists like Hitchens do not grasp is that if God does not exist as God, God definitely exists as a religious metaphor. But metaphor for what ? If it is not God who commands men to love their neighbour (and sometimes kill him) in the name of God, then what is it ? I absolutely confirm that atheists are capable of doing good, and in fact most are as fit to be taught morals as most theists are. But I also observe that secularist creeds and ideologies are as likely to be invoked in oppressing the mass of humanity, and unleashing death and mayhem. So the challenge for an atheist of is not in resizing God for his genocidal assault on Pharaoh’s Egypt but in the understanding of human imagination that would have God not only unleash the pestilence but first harden the ruler’s heart as a way of justifying the actions of the Omnipotent. Voltaire was of course wrong about the need of inventing God. If God did not exist, only human imagination would have to be invented. God (or other name for the image of the untouched sacred) would naturally suggest itself to it. However, since the paranoid beliefs that are always present in justifying murder, can exist without referencing the sacred, one cannot claim that it is religion that kills. One would be more à propos in saying that killing is paranoia’s mistaken method of trying to get rid of itself.
So, the intellectually honest atheists will find that it is not religion that kills, even if the killings are done ostensibly for religious reasons. In his seminal essay on the Levellers during the English Civil War, German pre-WW1 socialist Eduard Bernstein showed how religious metaphors in history often mask social justice issues. In Nothern Ireland, sectarian strife which had Left-Right political axis from the start in the early 1970’s, later morphed into warfare between rival drug mafias. The sudden Catholic revival in Poland of the 1980’s had near zero religious content (in the cities, anyhow). At the bottom, it was a nationalist movement against communism and Russia’s hegemony. Europe’s most enduring ostensibly religious conflict, the Thirty Year War in the 17th century, was at the root a dynastic clash, an attempt to control the House of Habsburg’s continental ambitions by Europe’s other powers. In this strife Catholic France was allied with Protestant Sweden. While the anti-reformation crusades were for real, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio withstood the test and the Westphalian Peace confirmed the ascendancy of the dynastic secular state over Church dominated empire. In Europe then at least, one would have to go as far back as the expulsion of Huguenots from France to find a large civil or international conflict based chiefly on religious disputes.
Hitchens supplies religious motives to conflicts where either none figure or figure as transparent mannequins for other issues. The chapter on religious kill opens with the indictment of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic whom the author casts as Orthodox Serbian mass murderers. The idea itself is silly beyond belief, and normally would shock coming from someone like Hitchens, who is bright, curious, and a well-travelled individual. But the problem may be that Christopher also has a short fuse, likes to strike a pose, and prefers taking sides to diving for a detailed analysis. So it should come as no surprise that his views on former Yugoslavia do not exceed for informed content the daily cheerful briefings by Jamie Shea on the progress of 1999 NATO bombing of Milosevic patrimony back to the stone age. In reality, the two Bosnian Serb leaders, though serving the same cause while detesting each other, had no religious motives for their actions. Karadzic’ photo-ops with Orthodox priests equal in religious significance the snapshots of the Clintons emerging from a Sunday church service. His outrageous shelling of Sarajevo drew ire even from Milosevic (with missus badmouthing him publicly), so I am ok with the mass murderer epithet. I am not so sure though that Presbyterianism was the poison that made Bill Clinton order the bombardment of Serbian power grid, water treatment plants, markets, passenger trains and hospitals. Mladic, originally a stalwart communist, became disenchanted, and embraced the Serbian traditional hard-drinking form of nihilism, on the way becoming the most shining exemplar of the VJ necrophilia. Incidentally, every informed school kid in Bosnia knows that Karadzic had nothing to do with Srebrenica. It was all Mladic’ doing at the time when the psychiatrist-poet-embezzler-demagogue was laying low, reeling from the charges of war profiteering. The general did not even bother informing the disgraced politicos in Pale (i.e. Karadzic and Krajisnik) that he was going in.
Curiously, about the only truly religious man in the war, Alija Izetbegovic, Hitchens has nothing to say. Yet it was he who dreamed a strange dream of an Islamic state in the Balkans. When the news reached him of Serbian heads cut off by bin Laden’s mujehadeen whom he invited to fight in Bosnia, he is said to have shrugged them off. ‘O Alijah, o honoured, you drive the Americans crazy !’, sang the mujehadeen. Indeed he did. For the record though, it was the Americans not Allah who told him it was ok to tear up Tito’s Bosnian constitution and withdraw from the Lisbon agreement. The Americans knew they were setting up a regime led by a man, who as far back as 1940’s Ustasha Sarajevo, edited a sophomoric rag called ‘Mujahid’. Without them, Alija would have been day-dreaming to his dying days. Without them, Karadzic would have had to find a fighting cause other than Bosnian moslem integrism to finance his gambling habit by war booty.
Overall, much as Hitchens wants to make of the religious links of the ethnic Balkan tensions, he has no real argument. The sudden religious fervor of notorious bandits, (like Arkan), does not fool anyone with a thinking hat. The link of the chetnik politicos (the Radical Party of Seselj) with the Serbian church actually predated the Bosnian war, would be best seen as a cynical but futile ploy to break the “godless” Milosevic’ political stranglehold on the country. It was they and not Milosevic who desired a ‘Greater Serbia’ in preference to Slobo’s pious (read twisted) socialist dream of reformed Yugoslav federation where noone would beat up on the Serbs. Hitchens also poorly grasps the historic relation of the Croatian Catholic Church to the Ustashe state. While at the start, the Church was enthusiastic about the mass conversion of Serbs, it quickly distanced itself from the official ethnic policies, and was sharply critical of both the Jasenovac camp atrocities and the murderous spree of Pavelic’ notorious gangs like the Black Legion. If the Nazi German charge d’affaires submitted a number of diplomatic notes of protest to the Ustasha primitive view of the art of genocide, the Zagreb archbishop did one better. Aloise Stepinac intercepted Ante Pavelic on the stairs of the cathedral and refused him entry with the words: ‘It is written, “thou shall not kill”’.
In a similar simplistic fashion the Lebanese civil strife of the 1970-80’s is presented as an inevitable quarrel between many indigenous religious “serpents”. In actual reality, the relatively stable Lebanese entity was rocked in the 1970’s by two very secular political play makers. One, after its bloody expulsion from Jordan, Yasser Arafat’s PLO made Beirut the base of his operations against Israel. Two, Hafez Assad started to play out his ambitions of a pan-Arabic leader from Syria. It was only later that the Iranian theocracy began to assert itself (when the U.S. would not). Among the many things that Hitchens’ book is wrong about, are the origins of the Hezbollah. It did not spring up as a result of Israel’s invasion but from a complex new political situation brought about by Iran’s intervention in the Lebanese Civil War. It did not organize the “Shia underclass” which was already organized as the Movement of the Disinherited with its own militia, the Amal. Hezbollah merely deployed Khomeini’s ideology and his material support in the attempt to dominate the Lebanese Shia. To that end, it continues to engage in a struggle with Amal (allied more closely with Syria). On occasion, the feud between the two parties has turned bloody even though no visible divide exists in their religious beliefs or practices.
It is not just that Hitchens ignores obviously secular motives in conflicts; he simply does not grasp the uses of religious symbols and identities for secularist ends. For example, he tries to squeeze some ideological milk from such trivia as Assad’s Alawi connections or the nominally Christian origins of the Baath party founder, not to mention the earth-shattering discovery that Stalin spent a few years as a teen in a Tiflis seminary. Those who think Saddam Hussein was a secularist, are ‘deluding themselves’ by Hitchens’ reckoning. Unfortunately, the delusion seems to be widespread and include not just the Islamists themselves, who hated Saddam as infidel, and were not at all fooled by his ostentatious displays of a newly-found faith late in his reign, but also the Middle East experts who never changed classing his profile and ambitions as closest to Nasserism. No apparent reason to think of Saddam’s videos of ‘private’ prayers differently than Yasser Arafat’s finding the Koran once seriously tested by Hamas.
The obsession with religion poisoning everything of course has an even greater challenge. What such an idea logically assumes is that nothing outside of religion in humanity is rotten before it is touched by religion. I am not sure Hitchens really means that. (He seems to be contradicting himself freely and often). Like the Book of Genesis on the wife of Cain, he stays silent on the origins of non-religious forms of hatred. The Nazi idea of anti-Jewishness had racial origins, not religious ones – the difference of course being that one could not convert from being a Jew in Nazi Germany. In Rwanda, the basis of genocide was tribal hatred, in Japan-occupied China a homegrown, fanaticized version of the Volksgeist, in the Ukraine and Cambodia the quickening of the class struggle, in the traditional Indonesian pogroms on Chinese trading quarters - frankly and unabashedly – the joy of looting. Bottom line: nowhere in these assaults on humanity at large, religion figured as primary mover or motive. The silence of Vatican on Nazi atrocities was of course shameful and stained the church. The enlightened pontiff John XXIII. admitted as much. But whatever one can say about that, one cannot reasonably hold that religion, Catholic or other, poisoned Nazism, fascism, racism or communism, or addled the rapine instinct. The finding that Rwanda was the most Catholic of all African countries, is as irrelevant as the degree of civilization preceding Hitler in Germany. While the descent into murderous chaos in the country can be ascribed to many factors, none of them had to do with religious beliefs of the opposing sides – both of whom actually favored Catholicism. Neither the evil Old Testament, nor the even more evil New Testament, refer to Israel God’s enemies as cockroaches. That there were church officials implicated in abetting the murderous psychosis is certainly a fact that cannot be wished away or talked around. But these people were not the church and their actions were not its teachings. It takes a mind poisoned by something else than religion not to find an appropriate adjective for those few priests and nuns who betrayed the souls who sought refuge from the madness in their churches and its compounds.
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“When the Jews desire something they say God set their hearts to it, when they get it, they say God gave it to them, and when they think something, they say God told them”, wrote Benedict Spinoza for the thinkers in pre-industrial Europe. In this view God existed as a way of expressing the existential reality of one’s passive reception of life. Spinoza brilliantly captured the paradox of his theism (cleverly exaggerating the religious affect) as the obverse of his rationality. It rests with the acknowledgment that our egos are overcome, overwhelmed – regularly, constantly. We don’t go to sleep; sleep comes to us. We don’t like things – they make themselves likeable to us (das gefällt mir /ça me plaît/это мне нравитъся). We get erections. We get lucky. We don’t chose our race, sex, nationality, class, name. It is chosen for us. Our health seems to operate independently of our will. Many things that I or we cannot control, come to play with us. This is as true of a cave dweller in the last Ice Age as of a proud contemporary shareholder in a machine-gun guarded Florida condominium. The latter may of course optionally insist on utter meaninglessness of the universe in the fashion of Christopher Hitchens. Yes, he may believe that have evolved through a completely random process of selection without any purpose built into nature and that Viagra is a proof that erections, like religions, are man-made. He can abstract himself – in the fashion his civilization presently insists on doing- right out of his Existenz. But what he, like his mentors, will not get is that it does not change his Sitz im Leben. Neither will he grasp the failure of his creed of Nihilism when confronted by the charms of Viet-cong, or the Islam of the swarms of ragged-ass suicide bombers who thwart the spread of American Techné as the Ersatz to meaningful life.
Hitchens, like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, chooses to combat 4th and 7th century superstitions with the outmoded scientism of 19th century that died in the equations of Maxwell and Planck. In the emerging physics revolving around the wave-particle duality, the Cartesian divide of matter and mind collapses. There is no “physical reality” beyond the “reality that is observed”, and though one of the founding fathers of modern physics, Albert Einstein, disagreed formally with the quantum boys, in practical terms, the subatomic world destroyed the materialist foundation on which the Newtonian physics built. Paradox has come to dominate both science and philosophy.
It is interesting to observe how thinkers deal with this fundamental (or should I say foundational) absence of certainty. There will be some who will insist that the materialistic collapse is a proof positive that God exists, in the naïve understanding of God as a separate, finite, sentient and speculating being. They do not talk about God but a Giant Antropomorph. But such belief is illusory, resulting from an attempt to cogitate an intuition of a meaningful Whole, as a category (idealized humanoid) belonging to a spatio-temporal (or “local”) reality. When such a mental operation fails, a substitute is sought in which an idealized humanoid is asserted as not God himself but a family relation. But the problem is that nearly anyone who has some intellectual capacity intuits immediately that we are not talking local reality that these figures of speech are relating to.
On the opposite end of the extreme, atheism becomes a virulent creed. Alexander Gilchrist, William Blake’s first biographer, reported that ten-year old William upon reporting he saw angels in a tree was spanked by his father, “for telling lies”. When we read something like that most of us see an innocent child's phantasy of bliss and a brutal attempt to suppress it. The hard-nosed affect which pretends not to grasp that all religious speech is hyperbolic in nature has however more sinister face to it. A Mauthausen SS-commandant (in Volker Schlöndorff’’s movie Der Neunte Tag) screams maniacally at a prisoner priest just before ordering him hoisted on a makeshift cross: Wo ist er ? Siehst du ihn hier irgendwo ? (Where is he (God) ? Do you see him here some place?)
Those clever enough to get the drift of this essay, will have already seized on my desire to show that the root of fundamentalism really is one and the same for theist and atheist forms of dogma. It manifests itself as a fanatical denial that God operates as a metaphor. Both camps treat God as something material, palpable and existing outside of creation. The atheist dogmatist of course nixes such an idea, but that does not prevent him of issuing scathing critiques and denunciatons of God. I am sure Hitchens does not even realize the logical embarras of assigning grammatically attributes (not great) to something he swears just isn’t there (God).
Yet this is no mistake. This just happens to be the grammar of the crusader. Richard Dawkins may protest all he wants that he is no fundamentalist (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1779771.ece) , but the charge sticks. He invades Ted Haggard’s compound, and expostulates with the evangelist knowing full well the wily preacher has not the wherewithal to respond intelligently to his challenges (http://www.panopticist.com/video/richard_dawkins.mov). Why would someone with Dawkins’ brains want to waste his time in this way ? The clip reveals an upset Dawkins accusing Haggard of all manner of iniquity, challenging him with sly innuendo (“a quite a bit of money spent here”) and absurd hyperboles (“reminded of Nurnberg rally”). There is an awful chip on his shoulder which he seems unaware of. There is something that colors his vision of Ted Haggard as a powerful, hugely harmful monstrosity, something that seems as intellectually inaccessible to Richard Dawkins as the concept of environmental pressure on a species is to Ted Haggard. Unless I am very badly mistaken, it was that something, that unseen inspired source of force and passion, within us and without us, against which we all are helpless, that the ancient Jews feared, sought to mollify and pointed to as YHWH.
There is a strikingly naïve assumption present throughout Hitchens’ book, namely that all people in all history and geographical locations have had at their disposal the mental organization which is routinely available to its readers. This mistake leads the author to bizarre judgmental posturing. One would not conclude when an infant shits outside of diapers that it is out of a wicked contempt for hygiene. By the same token one cannot hold that the biblical story of Isaac is one of child abuse. Anthropologists from fields all over the world report deadly assaults of parents on children that happen in a transitory fit of anger or on inexplicable inner promptings. These acts are usually followed by periods of profound sorrow and bewilderment. The ancient Hebrews, like all undeveloped cultures on the planet sought to cope with the violent impulse that was overcoming them, and which most - in a natural psychological maneouvre – sought to control by dissociating their reality-oriented selves from it. Unlike the Japanese culture which isolated the violent impulse as an undesirable mental happening (kikenshiso) and declared a taboo against it, the Jews imagined they would be spared of the mysterious Prompter’s anger if they, as a tribe, entered into a covenant with Him. Whatever one may think of this as survival strategy, one cannot equate it with a conscious desire to harm children.
The chapter on religion as “child abuse” seems particularly revealing in other respects as well. It opens with a motto from Brothers Karamazov, which Hitchens grasps so poorly he deploys for the indictment of religion the very phenom that haunted Dostoyevsky – i.e., the modern man without conscience. Ivan, to Dostoyevsky, stood as the classic prototype of the godless man, a cynical manipulator, a manqué of morality, inexorably driven to patricide. That Hitchens would present Ivan’s fallacious et-tu-quoque to Alyosha – his estranged inner self – as an argument against religion, comments more on the book’s intellectual grade than all the other mementos combined.
A page later Hitchens discovers, when contemplating James Joyce’s Father Arnall and his accounts of hell, that the intent of scaring kids with visions of eternal perdition is itself childlike. He then goes say that men were paid by the established religion to frighten (and to torture) kids in a like fashion. He then says there are other ‘man-made stupidities and cruelties of the religious’. Driving himself into a logical corner, he admits that we cannot blame religion for the nastiness of mankind, or the impulse to torture. But lest he fail on his promise to cut God to size, he will blame religion for institutionalizing and refining the practice. In other words, religion cannot be blamed for the viciousness of humans but for providing the outlet for it. One wonders how Hitchens explains that nearly all the nastiness coming from religious folks comes from breaking the very rules of conduct which they declare as pleasing to God, and which they swear to uphold.
All of this charts an interesting progress of a train of thought to its eventual derailment: Is it religion that institutionalizes religion? Or is it just another instance of Ted Haggard naively representing (in the video clip above) that the eye somehow creates itself ? Does the self-righteous belief in hell for people who are judged not good, automatically extend to sending them there in auto-da-fes ? And if the answer is yes, what is it that attracts saints to religion ? Or if one does not believe in saints, how would one respond to G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that his choice (Catholicism) is evidently the superior Christianity as it admits all faith, even the respectable one ?
The solution that Christopher Hitchens offers for examples of respectable faith, appears to be a very simple one. He will deny it exists. So deep is the anti-religious bite he suffered that he would excise from his scathing critique of Mother Teresa, whom he dismisses as “ambitious nun”, any sort of acknowledgement of her humanitarian mission. She is portrayed simply as a political busybody and the focus of fraudulent miracle mongering (as though she cultivated beliefs of herself as deliverer of miracles). A space alien relying on Hitchens’ report of her could easily mistake her for Leona Helmsley. It is not hard to see where Hitchens gets his negative perception of the woman. She could indeed be indiscreet, and quite frankly, vociferous, in her political crusades. (In a speech here in Ottawa, in 1992, she demanded that doctors performing abortions be jailed). But with equal frankness, I have hard time grasping the poverty of spirit which would deny that Mother Teresa did enormous amount of good, especially among those who until her were untouched by human love. Despite her failings and intellectual frailty, she was a phenomenon. It cannot be denied without a making oneself a graceless lout.
If the conservative Albanian nun comes as easy pickings, another modern ikon, Martin Luther King, proves a nut impossible to crack. Not only Hitchens denies the the force of religious themes in King’s oratory, he engages in a futile, flakey speculations which have as aim proving that King was really not a Christian.
The page where Martin Luther King makes an appearance is preceeded by an assertion that all Christian churches warmly approved of slavery. Here, as elsewhere, Hitchens erudition fails miserably. In fact, on both sides of the Atlantic, English speaking churches the congregations were deeply divided on the issue of slavery. This division existed among denominations (with Catholics, Quakers, Unitarian, and Methodists showing strongly on the abolitionist side, while the Anglican/Episcopalian Church, and Southern Baptist Churches, on balance supporting it) and within the churches themselves, often causing whole flocks to separate. For example, Henry Ward Beecher’s famous Plymouth Church in Brooklyn grew out of the abolitionist schism among the Calvinists. So it is plainly rubbish to say that Christians, as a whole, approved of slavery. Quite the contrary, the earliest impetus for suppressing the slave trade came from the religious folks in England, and the leading parliamentary advocate for it, William Wilberforce was not just a regular Anglican (a precondition for a seat in Parliament at the time) but a religious revivalist who among other things established the first Christian mission to India. Likewise in the United States, the most vehement denunciation of slavery came from the preachers. Many historians commented on the Garrisonian style of political discourse as naturally bonding with the fiery sermons of the Quakers. Most Quakers of the time agreed with the tradition laid out in the church a century earlier by one Benjamin Lay: slavery is a notorious sin.
So, if Hitchens believes that Martin Luther King was driven into a hotbed of vicious racism, he is pathetically misinformed. In actual fact, the view that all humans are equal (before God), came first as a religious revelation to Paul of Tarsus. There were no secular humanists in his time who could grasp the idea that all humans were equal. There was no “local” context for it. It contradicted everything the Greco-Roman antiquity knew and observed about humans and their society. Yet Paul knew differently: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.(Gal 3:28). This was the Christian innovation, this was the promised land. For this reason, and no other, it made sense to Martin Luther King to march and make speeches in preference to preaching mayhem in the streets. He was a Christian. He lived among people who believed themselves Christians.
***
I have already conceded that atheists may be, and are, as moral humans as theists. Personally, the most morally fit individual I have met in my life was my uncle Mirek, who was a communist. “You cannot teach bastards to be communists”, he told me stoically when I confronted his creed, as I was leaving Prague shortly after the Soviets invaded in 1968. Like all heroes of my youth, my uncle was utterly unsentimental. He was forthright, unaffected, had a wicked sense of humour, unerring sense of fairness, and distaste for any kind of posturing. His creed was communism, I teased him, because it would happen whether people believed in it or not. It was a fix, not a proposition. He told me matter-of-actly that I was full of crap. He believed because to him exaggerated material self-interest was the root of evil, and it was common sense. Unless I could show him something better to believe, he stayed put and I should not waste his time. When I – a twenty-one year old punk - told him I believed in democracy, he gave me his patented mocking look, and offered me a tea cake with his favourite stopper to anyone getting on a high horse with him: neserme se (let’s not piss each other off).
If Marxism is an expression of will, as André Malraux wrote in La condition humaine, so are all other belief systems around which humans organize themselves. The first thing one should be aware of when attempting a critique of one set of beliefs, is that it is made only by another set of beliefs. They appear as ridiculous to another expression of human will. Many Marxists swear they find the Bible preposterously childish, yet they insist on the History`s inevitable march to one person - a German cigar-smoker by the name of Karl Marx, and his discovery of an ultimate philosophical method which could be applied to anything. (For Marx`s hilarious occultic dabbling in math see an appendix to Edmund Wilson`s To Finland Station.) So how is the belief in the finality of Karl Marx`s scientific method materially different from the belief that all creation was fixed in the past by God (or gods) ? The patterns of obsessive thought seem to find themselves across beliefs, do they not ?
Like Hitchens, I count myself a rationalist, and therefore I share in many of his observations. Like him I have a hearty dislike of religious ceremony. I take in this after my father. He was an agnostic from a Jewish-Catholic background, but as my Catholic mother told me when I was very sick as a child, he actually went to church. Knowing my father , I had a hard time believing it: “Did he pray ?” Mom said, “ No, he went there because he didn’t want to lose you, but he was too stubborn to pray or kneel in the pew. I suppose he went there with the idea that his showing up there would be enough to attest he was genuinely confused on the subject of God’s existence, and that God, if he existed, would understand and feel compelled to take pity. When you recovered, he continued to blaspheme.”
At any rate, the point that really divides Hitchens and I on the subject is that I do not believe religion to be any kind of a danger to a civilized, rationally ordered society. I am convinced that the West operating with a sober, self-confident civil edifice would quickly do away with any of the fundamentalist accretions and revivals of primitive, intellectually and humanly inferior, forms of faith that we have seen in the recent past. As Christopher Lasch pointed out, civil disorders and revolutions happen whenever a vacuum of power is created. The re-appearance of militant, violent faith, coincides with a rapid decline in civilizational standards, and a positive self-image of the West. One quick example of this was the debate over the use of torture in combating terrorism. No self-respecting politician in the West in the last two hundred years past would have contemplated torture as an acceptable method of extracting information from political prisoners. It’s an abomination. It is at loggerheads with the elemental principles on which our civilization has been built. There simply cannot be a compromise on that point. The pictures from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo however do not lie, and that the problem has become endemic is attested to by the lack of public outrage to this manifest depravity. No, it is not religion that threatens to destroy what has been built up in the West; it is the narcissistic self-seeking that has come to displace almost completely the transcendent values that were once cherished and for which we suddenly find ourselves unable to find a new intellectual face. Beyond that, there is no real divide between the secular and the mystical, two aspects of our selves reflecting the two hemispheres of our cortex receiving, and responding to the gift of life. No Berlin Walls need to be invented for the two hearts of man of Goethe. Poetry(, religious or other,) does not kill. In a healthy brain, the corpus callosum will eventually take care of the poet should he or she reveal the ambition to rule the world. At any rate, that is in capsule my reading of the allegory that came to be known as the gospel of Mark.
October 2007
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THE STRANGE CASE OF A RELIGION-OBSESSED ATHEIST
Review of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great.
If professing atheism is, as I believe, wishing upon the Impotent, then Christopher Hitchens’ newest book title is a muezzin’s call.. Normally, a book with a title God Is Not Great would leave me stone cold, as it connotes a buzz between the ears believing itself to be thought. But two things raised my eyebrow as I was pulling a copy off the shelf at Chapters. One, it was written by Hitchens who is not dumb and whose compulsive trashing can be on occasion witty. Two, as a student of religion, or rather the psychology thereof, I was immediately drawn by the rendering of the title, namely the insistence on the small case ‘g’ for the deity, which was faithfully carried on the back of the book and the frontispiece.
However, as I leafed through the volume, the nature of Hitchens’ religious problem seemed clear and self-evident. Christopher is terribly oppressed by religion the way forsworn bachelors are terribly oppressed by women. Religious folks won’t leave him alone. They are not just trying to seduce him, they want to ruin him. ‘People of faith’, writes the poor persecuted man, ‘are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard won human attainments…Religion poisons everything’.
The first observation a reasonable person, whatever his or her confession (or indifference to one), would make about such a statement is that it is hopelessly overstated. Hitchens does not live in Kabul or Peshawar, not even in Hillsboro, Tennessee. By a huge margin, people of faith do not plan anyone’s destruction. If hell is part of their eschatology, the lot of them leave the actual planning and execution to the Almighty. As they would have it, Mr Hitchens will go to hell because he has earned the passage. Most of today’s faithful do not express ill-will beyond that. Why there is a violent minority of religionists(which tends to swell at times), I will consider at a later point, but for now let me be as reassuring as I can be that it is a folly of clinical proportion to believe that religion causes passenger planes to crash into skyscrapers or high powered rifles to fire into abortion clinics.
Hitchens’ hopeless confusion about the object of his study reveals itself almost immediately. Religion kills, he states confidently in the title of chapter two. But if one proudly claims atheism as one’s personal creed, as Hitchens does, the statement has a way of contradicting itself. If religion is man-made (as he never tires to repeat) and God does not enter into his view of the universe, then something other than God causes (or better, ‘accounts for’) religion. If there is goodness and badness in humanity outside of God, for that which impels men to do good and bad things in the name of God, one cannot invoke or blame God (or religion) for things that are done mistakenly in his name or as his will. The point that loud atheists like Hitchens do not grasp is that if God does not exist as God, God definitely exists as a religious metaphor. But metaphor for what ? If it is not God who commands men to love their neighbour (and sometimes kill him) in the name of God, then what is it ? I absolutely confirm that atheists are capable of doing good, and in fact most are as fit to be taught morals as most theists are. But I also observe that secularist creeds and ideologies are as likely to be invoked in oppressing the mass of humanity, and unleashing death and mayhem. So the challenge for an atheist of is not in resizing God for his genocidal assault on Pharaoh’s Egypt but in the understanding of human imagination that would have God not only unleash the pestilence but first harden the ruler’s heart as a way of justifying the actions of the Omnipotent. Voltaire was of course wrong about the need of inventing God. If God did not exist, only human imagination would have to be invented. God (or other name for the image of the untouched sacred) would naturally suggest itself to it. However, since the paranoid beliefs that are always present in justifying murder, can exist without referencing the sacred, one cannot claim that it is religion that kills. One would be more à propos in saying that killing is paranoia’s mistaken method of trying to get rid of itself.
So, the intellectually honest atheists will find that it is not religion that kills, even if the killings are done ostensibly for religious reasons. In his seminal essay on the Levellers during the English Civil War, German pre-WW1 socialist Eduard Bernstein showed how religious metaphors in history often mask social justice issues. In Nothern Ireland, sectarian strife which had Left-Right political axis from the start in the early 1970’s, later morphed into warfare between rival drug mafias. The sudden Catholic revival in Poland of the 1980’s had near zero religious content (in the cities, anyhow). At the bottom, it was a nationalist movement against communism and Russia’s hegemony. Europe’s most enduring ostensibly religious conflict, the Thirty Year War in the 17th century, was at the root a dynastic clash, an attempt to control the House of Habsburg’s continental ambitions by Europe’s other powers. In this strife Catholic France was allied with Protestant Sweden. While the anti-reformation crusades were for real, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio withstood the test and the Westphalian Peace confirmed the ascendancy of the dynastic secular state over Church dominated empire. In Europe then at least, one would have to go as far back as the expulsion of Huguenots from France to find a large civil or international conflict based chiefly on religious disputes.
Hitchens supplies religious motives to conflicts where either none figure or figure as transparent mannequins for other issues. The chapter on religious kill opens with the indictment of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic whom the author casts as Orthodox Serbian mass murderers. The idea itself is silly beyond belief, and normally would shock coming from someone like Hitchens, who is bright, curious, and a well-travelled individual. But the problem may be that Christopher also has a short fuse, likes to strike a pose, and prefers taking sides to diving for a detailed analysis. So it should come as no surprise that his views on former Yugoslavia do not exceed for informed content the daily cheerful briefings by Jamie Shea on the progress of 1999 NATO bombing of Milosevic patrimony back to the stone age. In reality, the two Bosnian Serb leaders, though serving the same cause while detesting each other, had no religious motives for their actions. Karadzic’ photo-ops with Orthodox priests equal in religious significance the snapshots of the Clintons emerging from a Sunday church service. His outrageous shelling of Sarajevo drew ire even from Milosevic (with missus badmouthing him publicly), so I am ok with the mass murderer epithet. I am not so sure though that Presbyterianism was the poison that made Bill Clinton order the bombardment of Serbian power grid, water treatment plants, markets, passenger trains and hospitals. Mladic, originally a stalwart communist, became disenchanted, and embraced the Serbian traditional hard-drinking form of nihilism, on the way becoming the most shining exemplar of the VJ necrophilia. Incidentally, every informed school kid in Bosnia knows that Karadzic had nothing to do with Srebrenica. It was all Mladic’ doing at the time when the psychiatrist-poet-embezzler-demagogue was laying low, reeling from the charges of war profiteering. The general did not even bother informing the disgraced politicos in Pale (i.e. Karadzic and Krajisnik) that he was going in.
Curiously, about the only truly religious man in the war, Alija Izetbegovic, Hitchens has nothing to say. Yet it was he who dreamed a strange dream of an Islamic state in the Balkans. When the news reached him of Serbian heads cut off by bin Laden’s mujehadeen whom he invited to fight in Bosnia, he is said to have shrugged them off. ‘O Alijah, o honoured, you drive the Americans crazy !’, sang the mujehadeen. Indeed he did. For the record though, it was the Americans not Allah who told him it was ok to tear up Tito’s Bosnian constitution and withdraw from the Lisbon agreement. The Americans knew they were setting up a regime led by a man, who as far back as 1940’s Ustasha Sarajevo, edited a sophomoric rag called ‘Mujahid’. Without them, Alija would have been day-dreaming to his dying days. Without them, Karadzic would have had to find a fighting cause other than Bosnian moslem integrism to finance his gambling habit by war booty.
Overall, much as Hitchens wants to make of the religious links of the ethnic Balkan tensions, he has no real argument. The sudden religious fervor of notorious bandits, (like Arkan), does not fool anyone with a thinking hat. The link of the chetnik politicos (the Radical Party of Seselj) with the Serbian church actually predated the Bosnian war, would be best seen as a cynical but futile ploy to break the “godless” Milosevic’ political stranglehold on the country. It was they and not Milosevic who desired a ‘Greater Serbia’ in preference to Slobo’s pious (read twisted) socialist dream of reformed Yugoslav federation where noone would beat up on the Serbs. Hitchens also poorly grasps the historic relation of the Croatian Catholic Church to the Ustashe state. While at the start, the Church was enthusiastic about the mass conversion of Serbs, it quickly distanced itself from the official ethnic policies, and was sharply critical of both the Jasenovac camp atrocities and the murderous spree of Pavelic’ notorious gangs like the Black Legion. If the Nazi German charge d’affaires submitted a number of diplomatic notes of protest to the Ustasha primitive view of the art of genocide, the Zagreb archbishop did one better. Aloise Stepinac intercepted Ante Pavelic on the stairs of the cathedral and refused him entry with the words: ‘It is written, “thou shall not kill”’.
In a similar simplistic fashion the Lebanese civil strife of the 1970-80’s is presented as an inevitable quarrel between many indigenous religious “serpents”. In actual reality, the relatively stable Lebanese entity was rocked in the 1970’s by two very secular political play makers. One, after its bloody expulsion from Jordan, Yasser Arafat’s PLO made Beirut the base of his operations against Israel. Two, Hafez Assad started to play out his ambitions of a pan-Arabic leader from Syria. It was only later that the Iranian theocracy began to assert itself (when the U.S. would not). Among the many things that Hitchens’ book is wrong about, are the origins of the Hezbollah. It did not spring up as a result of Israel’s invasion but from a complex new political situation brought about by Iran’s intervention in the Lebanese Civil War. It did not organize the “Shia underclass” which was already organized as the Movement of the Disinherited with its own militia, the Amal. Hezbollah merely deployed Khomeini’s ideology and his material support in the attempt to dominate the Lebanese Shia. To that end, it continues to engage in a struggle with Amal (allied more closely with Syria). On occasion, the feud between the two parties has turned bloody even though no visible divide exists in their religious beliefs or practices.
It is not just that Hitchens ignores obviously secular motives in conflicts; he simply does not grasp the uses of religious symbols and identities for secularist ends. For example, he tries to squeeze some ideological milk from such trivia as Assad’s Alawi connections or the nominally Christian origins of the Baath party founder, not to mention the earth-shattering discovery that Stalin spent a few years as a teen in a Tiflis seminary. Those who think Saddam Hussein was a secularist, are ‘deluding themselves’ by Hitchens’ reckoning. Unfortunately, the delusion seems to be widespread and include not just the Islamists themselves, who hated Saddam as infidel, and were not at all fooled by his ostentatious displays of a newly-found faith late in his reign, but also the Middle East experts who never changed classing his profile and ambitions as closest to Nasserism. No apparent reason to think of Saddam’s videos of ‘private’ prayers differently than Yasser Arafat’s finding the Koran once seriously tested by Hamas.
The obsession with religion poisoning everything of course has an even greater challenge. What such an idea logically assumes is that nothing outside of religion in humanity is rotten before it is touched by religion. I am not sure Hitchens really means that. (He seems to be contradicting himself freely and often). Like the Book of Genesis on the wife of Cain, he stays silent on the origins of non-religious forms of hatred. The Nazi idea of anti-Jewishness had racial origins, not religious ones – the difference of course being that one could not convert from being a Jew in Nazi Germany. In Rwanda, the basis of genocide was tribal hatred, in Japan-occupied China a homegrown, fanaticized version of the Volksgeist, in the Ukraine and Cambodia the quickening of the class struggle, in the traditional Indonesian pogroms on Chinese trading quarters - frankly and unabashedly – the joy of looting. Bottom line: nowhere in these assaults on humanity at large, religion figured as primary mover or motive. The silence of Vatican on Nazi atrocities was of course shameful and stained the church. The enlightened pontiff John XXIII. admitted as much. But whatever one can say about that, one cannot reasonably hold that religion, Catholic or other, poisoned Nazism, fascism, racism or communism, or addled the rapine instinct. The finding that Rwanda was the most Catholic of all African countries, is as irrelevant as the degree of civilization preceding Hitler in Germany. While the descent into murderous chaos in the country can be ascribed to many factors, none of them had to do with religious beliefs of the opposing sides – both of whom actually favored Catholicism. Neither the evil Old Testament, nor the even more evil New Testament, refer to Israel God’s enemies as cockroaches. That there were church officials implicated in abetting the murderous psychosis is certainly a fact that cannot be wished away or talked around. But these people were not the church and their actions were not its teachings. It takes a mind poisoned by something else than religion not to find an appropriate adjective for those few priests and nuns who betrayed the souls who sought refuge from the madness in their churches and its compounds.
***
“When the Jews desire something they say God set their hearts to it, when they get it, they say God gave it to them, and when they think something, they say God told them”, wrote Benedict Spinoza for the thinkers in pre-industrial Europe. In this view God existed as a way of expressing the existential reality of one’s passive reception of life. Spinoza brilliantly captured the paradox of his theism (cleverly exaggerating the religious affect) as the obverse of his rationality. It rests with the acknowledgment that our egos are overcome, overwhelmed – regularly, constantly. We don’t go to sleep; sleep comes to us. We don’t like things – they make themselves likeable to us (das gefällt mir /ça me plaît/это мне нравитъся). We get erections. We get lucky. We don’t chose our race, sex, nationality, class, name. It is chosen for us. Our health seems to operate independently of our will. Many things that I or we cannot control, come to play with us. This is as true of a cave dweller in the last Ice Age as of a proud contemporary shareholder in a machine-gun guarded Florida condominium. The latter may of course optionally insist on utter meaninglessness of the universe in the fashion of Christopher Hitchens. Yes, he may believe that have evolved through a completely random process of selection without any purpose built into nature and that Viagra is a proof that erections, like religions, are man-made. He can abstract himself – in the fashion his civilization presently insists on doing- right out of his Existenz. But what he, like his mentors, will not get is that it does not change his Sitz im Leben. Neither will he grasp the failure of his creed of Nihilism when confronted by the charms of Viet-cong, or the Islam of the swarms of ragged-ass suicide bombers who thwart the spread of American Techné as the Ersatz to meaningful life.
Hitchens, like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, chooses to combat 4th and 7th century superstitions with the outmoded scientism of 19th century that died in the equations of Maxwell and Planck. In the emerging physics revolving around the wave-particle duality, the Cartesian divide of matter and mind collapses. There is no “physical reality” beyond the “reality that is observed”, and though one of the founding fathers of modern physics, Albert Einstein, disagreed formally with the quantum boys, in practical terms, the subatomic world destroyed the materialist foundation on which the Newtonian physics built. Paradox has come to dominate both science and philosophy.
It is interesting to observe how thinkers deal with this fundamental (or should I say foundational) absence of certainty. There will be some who will insist that the materialistic collapse is a proof positive that God exists, in the naïve understanding of God as a separate, finite, sentient and speculating being. They do not talk about God but a Giant Antropomorph. But such belief is illusory, resulting from an attempt to cogitate an intuition of a meaningful Whole, as a category (idealized humanoid) belonging to a spatio-temporal (or “local”) reality. When such a mental operation fails, a substitute is sought in which an idealized humanoid is asserted as not God himself but a family relation. But the problem is that nearly anyone who has some intellectual capacity intuits immediately that we are not talking local reality that these figures of speech are relating to.
On the opposite end of the extreme, atheism becomes a virulent creed. Alexander Gilchrist, William Blake’s first biographer, reported that ten-year old William upon reporting he saw angels in a tree was spanked by his father, “for telling lies”. When we read something like that most of us see an innocent child's phantasy of bliss and a brutal attempt to suppress it. The hard-nosed affect which pretends not to grasp that all religious speech is hyperbolic in nature has however more sinister face to it. A Mauthausen SS-commandant (in Volker Schlöndorff’’s movie Der Neunte Tag) screams maniacally at a prisoner priest just before ordering him hoisted on a makeshift cross: Wo ist er ? Siehst du ihn hier irgendwo ? (Where is he (God) ? Do you see him here some place?)
Those clever enough to get the drift of this essay, will have already seized on my desire to show that the root of fundamentalism really is one and the same for theist and atheist forms of dogma. It manifests itself as a fanatical denial that God operates as a metaphor. Both camps treat God as something material, palpable and existing outside of creation. The atheist dogmatist of course nixes such an idea, but that does not prevent him of issuing scathing critiques and denunciatons of God. I am sure Hitchens does not even realize the logical embarras of assigning grammatically attributes (not great) to something he swears just isn’t there (God).
Yet this is no mistake. This just happens to be the grammar of the crusader. Richard Dawkins may protest all he wants that he is no fundamentalist (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1779771.ece) , but the charge sticks. He invades Ted Haggard’s compound, and expostulates with the evangelist knowing full well the wily preacher has not the wherewithal to respond intelligently to his challenges (http://www.panopticist.com/video/richard_dawkins.mov). Why would someone with Dawkins’ brains want to waste his time in this way ? The clip reveals an upset Dawkins accusing Haggard of all manner of iniquity, challenging him with sly innuendo (“a quite a bit of money spent here”) and absurd hyperboles (“reminded of Nurnberg rally”). There is an awful chip on his shoulder which he seems unaware of. There is something that colors his vision of Ted Haggard as a powerful, hugely harmful monstrosity, something that seems as intellectually inaccessible to Richard Dawkins as the concept of environmental pressure on a species is to Ted Haggard. Unless I am very badly mistaken, it was that something, that unseen inspired source of force and passion, within us and without us, against which we all are helpless, that the ancient Jews feared, sought to mollify and pointed to as YHWH.
There is a strikingly naïve assumption present throughout Hitchens’ book, namely that all people in all history and geographical locations have had at their disposal the mental organization which is routinely available to its readers. This mistake leads the author to bizarre judgmental posturing. One would not conclude when an infant shits outside of diapers that it is out of a wicked contempt for hygiene. By the same token one cannot hold that the biblical story of Isaac is one of child abuse. Anthropologists from fields all over the world report deadly assaults of parents on children that happen in a transitory fit of anger or on inexplicable inner promptings. These acts are usually followed by periods of profound sorrow and bewilderment. The ancient Hebrews, like all undeveloped cultures on the planet sought to cope with the violent impulse that was overcoming them, and which most - in a natural psychological maneouvre – sought to control by dissociating their reality-oriented selves from it. Unlike the Japanese culture which isolated the violent impulse as an undesirable mental happening (kikenshiso) and declared a taboo against it, the Jews imagined they would be spared of the mysterious Prompter’s anger if they, as a tribe, entered into a covenant with Him. Whatever one may think of this as survival strategy, one cannot equate it with a conscious desire to harm children.
The chapter on religion as “child abuse” seems particularly revealing in other respects as well. It opens with a motto from Brothers Karamazov, which Hitchens grasps so poorly he deploys for the indictment of religion the very phenom that haunted Dostoyevsky – i.e., the modern man without conscience. Ivan, to Dostoyevsky, stood as the classic prototype of the godless man, a cynical manipulator, a manqué of morality, inexorably driven to patricide. That Hitchens would present Ivan’s fallacious et-tu-quoque to Alyosha – his estranged inner self – as an argument against religion, comments more on the book’s intellectual grade than all the other mementos combined.
A page later Hitchens discovers, when contemplating James Joyce’s Father Arnall and his accounts of hell, that the intent of scaring kids with visions of eternal perdition is itself childlike. He then goes say that men were paid by the established religion to frighten (and to torture) kids in a like fashion. He then says there are other ‘man-made stupidities and cruelties of the religious’. Driving himself into a logical corner, he admits that we cannot blame religion for the nastiness of mankind, or the impulse to torture. But lest he fail on his promise to cut God to size, he will blame religion for institutionalizing and refining the practice. In other words, religion cannot be blamed for the viciousness of humans but for providing the outlet for it. One wonders how Hitchens explains that nearly all the nastiness coming from religious folks comes from breaking the very rules of conduct which they declare as pleasing to God, and which they swear to uphold.
All of this charts an interesting progress of a train of thought to its eventual derailment: Is it religion that institutionalizes religion? Or is it just another instance of Ted Haggard naively representing (in the video clip above) that the eye somehow creates itself ? Does the self-righteous belief in hell for people who are judged not good, automatically extend to sending them there in auto-da-fes ? And if the answer is yes, what is it that attracts saints to religion ? Or if one does not believe in saints, how would one respond to G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that his choice (Catholicism) is evidently the superior Christianity as it admits all faith, even the respectable one ?
The solution that Christopher Hitchens offers for examples of respectable faith, appears to be a very simple one. He will deny it exists. So deep is the anti-religious bite he suffered that he would excise from his scathing critique of Mother Teresa, whom he dismisses as “ambitious nun”, any sort of acknowledgement of her humanitarian mission. She is portrayed simply as a political busybody and the focus of fraudulent miracle mongering (as though she cultivated beliefs of herself as deliverer of miracles). A space alien relying on Hitchens’ report of her could easily mistake her for Leona Helmsley. It is not hard to see where Hitchens gets his negative perception of the woman. She could indeed be indiscreet, and quite frankly, vociferous, in her political crusades. (In a speech here in Ottawa, in 1992, she demanded that doctors performing abortions be jailed). But with equal frankness, I have hard time grasping the poverty of spirit which would deny that Mother Teresa did enormous amount of good, especially among those who until her were untouched by human love. Despite her failings and intellectual frailty, she was a phenomenon. It cannot be denied without a making oneself a graceless lout.
If the conservative Albanian nun comes as easy pickings, another modern ikon, Martin Luther King, proves a nut impossible to crack. Not only Hitchens denies the the force of religious themes in King’s oratory, he engages in a futile, flakey speculations which have as aim proving that King was really not a Christian.
The page where Martin Luther King makes an appearance is preceeded by an assertion that all Christian churches warmly approved of slavery. Here, as elsewhere, Hitchens erudition fails miserably. In fact, on both sides of the Atlantic, English speaking churches the congregations were deeply divided on the issue of slavery. This division existed among denominations (with Catholics, Quakers, Unitarian, and Methodists showing strongly on the abolitionist side, while the Anglican/Episcopalian Church, and Southern Baptist Churches, on balance supporting it) and within the churches themselves, often causing whole flocks to separate. For example, Henry Ward Beecher’s famous Plymouth Church in Brooklyn grew out of the abolitionist schism among the Calvinists. So it is plainly rubbish to say that Christians, as a whole, approved of slavery. Quite the contrary, the earliest impetus for suppressing the slave trade came from the religious folks in England, and the leading parliamentary advocate for it, William Wilberforce was not just a regular Anglican (a precondition for a seat in Parliament at the time) but a religious revivalist who among other things established the first Christian mission to India. Likewise in the United States, the most vehement denunciation of slavery came from the preachers. Many historians commented on the Garrisonian style of political discourse as naturally bonding with the fiery sermons of the Quakers. Most Quakers of the time agreed with the tradition laid out in the church a century earlier by one Benjamin Lay: slavery is a notorious sin.
So, if Hitchens believes that Martin Luther King was driven into a hotbed of vicious racism, he is pathetically misinformed. In actual fact, the view that all humans are equal (before God), came first as a religious revelation to Paul of Tarsus. There were no secular humanists in his time who could grasp the idea that all humans were equal. There was no “local” context for it. It contradicted everything the Greco-Roman antiquity knew and observed about humans and their society. Yet Paul knew differently: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.(Gal 3:28). This was the Christian innovation, this was the promised land. For this reason, and no other, it made sense to Martin Luther King to march and make speeches in preference to preaching mayhem in the streets. He was a Christian. He lived among people who believed themselves Christians.
***
I have already conceded that atheists may be, and are, as moral humans as theists. Personally, the most morally fit individual I have met in my life was my uncle Mirek, who was a communist. “You cannot teach bastards to be communists”, he told me stoically when I confronted his creed, as I was leaving Prague shortly after the Soviets invaded in 1968. Like all heroes of my youth, my uncle was utterly unsentimental. He was forthright, unaffected, had a wicked sense of humour, unerring sense of fairness, and distaste for any kind of posturing. His creed was communism, I teased him, because it would happen whether people believed in it or not. It was a fix, not a proposition. He told me matter-of-actly that I was full of crap. He believed because to him exaggerated material self-interest was the root of evil, and it was common sense. Unless I could show him something better to believe, he stayed put and I should not waste his time. When I – a twenty-one year old punk - told him I believed in democracy, he gave me his patented mocking look, and offered me a tea cake with his favourite stopper to anyone getting on a high horse with him: neserme se (let’s not piss each other off).
If Marxism is an expression of will, as André Malraux wrote in La condition humaine, so are all other belief systems around which humans organize themselves. The first thing one should be aware of when attempting a critique of one set of beliefs, is that it is made only by another set of beliefs. They appear as ridiculous to another expression of human will. Many Marxists swear they find the Bible preposterously childish, yet they insist on the History`s inevitable march to one person - a German cigar-smoker by the name of Karl Marx, and his discovery of an ultimate philosophical method which could be applied to anything. (For Marx`s hilarious occultic dabbling in math see an appendix to Edmund Wilson`s To Finland Station.) So how is the belief in the finality of Karl Marx`s scientific method materially different from the belief that all creation was fixed in the past by God (or gods) ? The patterns of obsessive thought seem to find themselves across beliefs, do they not ?
Like Hitchens, I count myself a rationalist, and therefore I share in many of his observations. Like him I have a hearty dislike of religious ceremony. I take in this after my father. He was an agnostic from a Jewish-Catholic background, but as my Catholic mother told me when I was very sick as a child, he actually went to church. Knowing my father , I had a hard time believing it: “Did he pray ?” Mom said, “ No, he went there because he didn’t want to lose you, but he was too stubborn to pray or kneel in the pew. I suppose he went there with the idea that his showing up there would be enough to attest he was genuinely confused on the subject of God’s existence, and that God, if he existed, would understand and feel compelled to take pity. When you recovered, he continued to blaspheme.”
At any rate, the point that really divides Hitchens and I on the subject is that I do not believe religion to be any kind of a danger to a civilized, rationally ordered society. I am convinced that the West operating with a sober, self-confident civil edifice would quickly do away with any of the fundamentalist accretions and revivals of primitive, intellectually and humanly inferior, forms of faith that we have seen in the recent past. As Christopher Lasch pointed out, civil disorders and revolutions happen whenever a vacuum of power is created. The re-appearance of militant, violent faith, coincides with a rapid decline in civilizational standards, and a positive self-image of the West. One quick example of this was the debate over the use of torture in combating terrorism. No self-respecting politician in the West in the last two hundred years past would have contemplated torture as an acceptable method of extracting information from political prisoners. It’s an abomination. It is at loggerheads with the elemental principles on which our civilization has been built. There simply cannot be a compromise on that point. The pictures from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo however do not lie, and that the problem has become endemic is attested to by the lack of public outrage to this manifest depravity. No, it is not religion that threatens to destroy what has been built up in the West; it is the narcissistic self-seeking that has come to displace almost completely the transcendent values that were once cherished and for which we suddenly find ourselves unable to find a new intellectual face. Beyond that, there is no real divide between the secular and the mystical, two aspects of our selves reflecting the two hemispheres of our cortex receiving, and responding to the gift of life. No Berlin Walls need to be invented for the two hearts of man of Goethe. Poetry(, religious or other,) does not kill. In a healthy brain, the corpus callosum will eventually take care of the poet should he or she reveal the ambition to rule the world. At any rate, that is in capsule my reading of the allegory that came to be known as the gospel of Mark.
October 2007
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