An Updated Answer for Job

by Editors

RELIGION

An Updated Answer for Job: Modern Religion and the New Pivot Point of History

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard

Why do humans believe in God? As the Biblical Job sat on the dung pile, covered in sores, a broken man, he earnestly questioned his friends. How is it I got here? Why does God allow suffering? At the end of the story, for his trials, Job receives a reinstatement of all his prosperity. Finally explaining his role in this fiasco, God gave Job a similar equivocal answer to the one he gave Moses on Mt. Sinai, “I am that I am.” Or, in other words, “It is not for you to ponder or understand.” For some probing mortal minds, therefore, Job’s important questions were never adequately answered.

In our evolving secular age, we often find that this traditional image of a distant deity is not appealing. Like Job, we have questions, and we want them answered in detailed ways. We are not unlike our more recent ancestors in this respect, beginning perhaps with members of the “Axial Age”, the period spanning 800-200 BC—the exact historical moment philosophy was invented as a discipline.

The so-called “Axial Age” was termed by Karl Jaspers in his book, The Origin and Goal of History (1949). Since its publication scholars have debated his far-reaching concept whereby unconnected philosophers in China, India, Mesopotamia and the Occident created similar revolutionary thought, expanding human understanding and spurring the full blossoming of the world’s great religions: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, reformed Judaism, and Christianity.

What caused this coeval world-wide paradigm shift is not clear, but Jaspers noted that each of the cultures in question were in inter-imperial lulls, when quiet moments of liberty allowed philosophers to wander about small principalities and exchange their developing ideas about the meaning of life and man’s place in the universe.

Roughly forty years after Jaspers, in her book A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993), former nun Karen Armstrong built upon Jaspers’ foundation, elaborating the connecting strings between the big three Mono-theistic traditions—a hot topic in today’s fractious world. In a rare feat of detached, historical criticism, Armstrong demonstrates how these religions have developed over time to reflect the very real fears, insecurities, triumphs and aspirations of their mortal followers. Sometimes these shifts privilege one group over another, the male sex over the female, one “chosen” tribe over its local neighbor, but Armstrong is careful to make clear that extreme, sometimes violent pendulum swings are more often outweighed by periods of peaceful understanding of commonalities.

Particularly striking to me, as a member of the twenty-first century, was her poignant statement that each of the historical religions have periodically gone through revolutionary “atheistic” moments, when the mantle of their forefathers’ religious practice had begun to feel ill-fitting. Putting lie to the Modern chestnut that Nietzsche killed religion, or, on the other hand, that “God” is unchanging and a-temporal, it seems that throughout human history a limited, human concept of “God” has routinely been retooled by successive generations in a cyclical process of shedding an old cultural form in preparation for a new paradigm. In essence, the eternal spirit was always there, but as human ideology changed, its earthly reflection necessarily adapted.

To contextualize this type of change, the beginning of Armstrong’s book firmly underlines the intrinsic human need for the spiritual, a finding echoing the important work of Joseph Campbell and others. This thread gives Armstrong the sure foundation needed to frame the vicissitudes of historical rejections of religion as particular moments in an ageless, metaphysical continuum. Necessarily, she is careful to delineate between the practice of religion and its underlying functions, much like Joseph Campbell when he separated the traditional roles of the priest versus the mystic in The Power of Myth (1988). The former is in charge of the social spectacle, the temporal form of the deity, and the latter channels the infinite spirit, or source of the archetypal myth.

This kind of sensible, cyclical understanding of our human need for spirituality allows us to see the current diapodes of the religion argument with the utter rejection of “God” on one side, and its counter-balance, zealous fundamentalism, as two extreme reactions to a moulting culture. In both, there remains a disconnect between past and present. In essence, the atheists renounce the old vision of “God” as childish and outmoded while the fundamentalist embraces an equally untenable a-historical understanding of religion. It seems that both are short-sightedly bound to the temporal, historical transmitters of the spiritual message, while the universal message of compassion is itself lost in transmission. Neither patiently attend the present rebirth of the spiritual in its new, unique mode.

In previous posts, like Turtles All the Way Down, I’ve discussed the theologian Harvey Cox’s vision for a new religion, one that privileges festivity and fantasy. While current forms of religion often stifle jubilation and creativity, in Cox’s vision, the uniquely human inventions of festivity and fantasy must be part of any religious endeavor. We might call this Job’s dilemma: finding bliss in our human state of suffering and practical concerns. According to Cox, if developed, this new religion could eradicate “crippling literalism,” the incapacitating fault he sees as the central attribute of both fanatical Atheism and Fundamentalism. This new religious mode would transcend the commonly held post-Enlightenment (often scientific) view that to know something is to see it, or at least to measure it. This would mean the feet of Positivism held to the flame of an ingrained human yearning for celebration and the spiritual.

Trying to fathom where religion is presently headed, Karen Armstrong, the French scholar Yves Lambert and others have posited that we are now in a new axial age. In 1999 Lambert wrote an article, “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?” (Sociology of Religion, 60/3, 303-33) which, to my mind, raises the question of whether or not the predictions made in Cox’s groundbreaking Secular City (1965) will come to pass. Thirty years after Cox, Lambert believes that the great traditional religions have adapted to modernity, though he also sees Fundamentalist reactions to this and the spread of new religious forms. Though Lambert effectively charts shifting public opinion on matters of religion, the question of how our global community will construct rituals and myths to frame our current “super-empirical” understanding remains cloudy. Will humanity be able to put aside old-fashioned tribal (or nationalistic) rhetoric in favor of an ecumenical religion of mankind? Will humans embrace what we share rather than what we see differently?

The findings of the neo-Axial Agists are nonetheless tantalizing. They may help to bridge the seeming gulf between the cultural warriors we see battling it out in the public arena. If only these polemicists could see that the broad middle has already beat the path to the future, and it is neither Atheism nor Fundamentalism. To solve the problems of the environment, social inequality and sectarian conflict, the broad middle of humanity will have to define our reflexive modernity in positive, humanist terms, assessing the excesses and dangers of unbridled consumption, science and technology through a lens of respect and harmony with our planet and our neighbors.

Luckily, with Post-Modern democratization and globalization (thanks, in part, to the Internet) we cannot go back to the earlier paradigm of “temple, palace and hut”, or “church, castle and cottage” (as Campbell aptly put it). Today every human being is endowed with global presence and power and our old symbolism of hierarchical organization (priest, president, and pop star) have systematically and cynically been dismantled.

In conclusion, contrary to Jaspers’ contention, I still believe de-mythologization remains a myth, as others have eloquently stated. As humans, we need stories to center us and help us forge our way into the future. Indeed, this ritualization of time and space as a metaphor for the infinite seems hardwired in humans. As Joseph Campbell has shown in his work, there can be no disintegration of temporal duality, the so-called “collapse of dualism” as coined by R.N. Bellah (Beyond Belief, 1976). Phenomenology (the first-person, intuitive experience of consciousness) requires this interpretation of the world; it is only in the complimentary, super-empirical / mystical realm beyond relativity where we can experience divinity. Admittedly, contemplating that sphere will always be an imperfect, human endeavor requiring faith. But, answers to life’s unanswered questions are always yearned for, and always well worth the effort. That’s human nature.

____________________
Bread and Circus contributing writer Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph.D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.

Turtles All the Way Down

by Editors

CULTURE & MYTH

Turtles All the Way Down

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, contributing writer

“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily, “Really you are very dull!”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, (Chapter 9)

What can one learn from the tortoise and turtle? A lot it seems.

In the Western tradition, we all know of Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare wherein “slow and steady wins the race”— a particularly relevant message in our harried, digital age. Of course, many of you will also remember that Dr. Seuss marshalled “Yertle-dogma” as a means to warn generations against the dangers of fascism and grasping dictatorship.

In Hindu belief, the tortoise is nothing less than the foundation of the universe. In one Vedic myth, a great flood regularly occurs every four billion years and completely dissolves the earth. The god Vishnu then returns as his second avatar (or, earthly incarnation), the tortoise Kurma. On his back rests Mandara Mountain (the eastern mountain of the four buttresses of the World Mountain/Mt. Meru); it serves as the gods’ churning rod to remake the earth from the sea of milk. In another Hindu story, the tortoise Chukwa serves as the underlying foundation for the “elephant-Atlas”, Maha-pudma.

Some Westerners have embraced this Eastern metaphor in their writings. To the catholic mind of the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, such mythic turtles and elephants support what he called “the edifice of empirical knowledge.” (Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 1956) Three decades later, Joseph Campbell remarked that most of humanity remained confounded by the implicit profundity of our own experience. Using a Polynesian saying, Campbell stated that we paradoxically find ourselves “standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” In other words, in our stubborn shortsightedness we still cannot see the cosmic turtle beneath our feet.

Contrary to what you might expect, even sober empiricists and scientists have co-opted the tortoise-tale. The story has been recounted by various notable public figures like Stephen Hawking, Bertrand Russell, H.D. Thoreau and even Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead of inspiring romantic wonder in them, however, the metaphysical story functions as a useful anecdote that pits naïve, subjective belief against rigorous, cerebral objectivity. From Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988):

A well-known scientist (some say it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Unfazed by the as yet unsolved mystery of the infinite regression of the universe, some literal-minded scientists like Stephen Hawking (and Richard Dawkins) dismiss their factual ignorance as just a temporary setback. For them, someday science will solve what we currently file under “mystery.” On that great day, the “patently ridiculous,” poetic turtle metaphor will fade away like the rest of humankind’s childish myths. It’s just a matter of time and the scientific method, and they never lose a night’s sleep over it.

These literal-minded scientists are close relatives to the “systems analysts” denounced by the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox in his book The Feast of Fools (1969). The two are philosophical bedfellows in the sense that they both rely overly on feasibility in their work. In Cox’s words, such figures limit themselves to “resources now in hand or foreseen” and, to the great detriment of society, “[this] discourages our hoping or aspiring toward something that flunks the feasibility test. This limits the sweep of human planning, political action, and cultural innovation.” (Feast of Fools, 85) I would add that they both work to extinguish our myths.

Paradoxically, on the other end of the philosophical spectrum from the literalists, unorthodox scientists, theologians and moralists creatively use the very same infinite-cosmos metaphor to bolster the opposite tack. For them, some cases the infinite regression story have become a means to legitimize “intelligent design” or creationism, thereby meta-scientifically solving (in an uncomfortable marriage of religion, philosophy and science) the question, “If God created the universe, what created God?”

These intrepid scholars and theologians might find the romantic “Turtles All the Way Down” myth as a useful metaphor to give perspective to history and to elucidate why demythologization is itself a myth—Positivism’s “myth of a mythless humanity.” As Belden C. Lane wrote, “[Demythologization’s] very insistence and repetitiveness in our cultural history, from Xenophanes to Voltaire, shows us to be incurable storytellers, molded by the power of myth.” (“The Power of Myth: Lessons from Joseph Campbell,” The Christian Century, July 5-12, 1989)

As the recent heated debate about atheism and “the death of God” in both mainstream media and on the Web has illustrated, perhaps humankind is already busy defining its next great pluralistic mythology. This is an idea that Cox has been suggesting since the mid-Sixties. In his books The Secular City (1965) and the aforementioned Feast of Fools (1969), Cox hints that that a new spiritual mode might result from the synthesis of the salvageable parts of traditional religion and a new infusion of festivity and fantasy. In his vision, the uniquely human endeavors of festivity and fantasy could eradicate “crippling literalism,” the incapacitating fault he sees as the central attribute of both fanatical Atheism and Fundamentalism.

As Cox has postulated in various arenas, any novel ecumenical mythology will likely embrace a new language about divinity. I would argue that it might be similar to a new mythic language which Campbell prophesied will “identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.” Cox further suggests that the universal, humanistic call to fight against poverty and social and environmental injustice might supply the substrate for the Post-Modern common cause.

Though it has been decades since Cox’s first recognition of the rising of the tide, this overdue development remains embryonic and amorphous. It does exist, however. With the recent trifecta of Al Gore’s worldwide environmentalist caché, John Edwards’ recalcitrant anti-poverty election platform, and the Republicans’ hesitant turn towards the political center, we may be getting a taste of the savory dialogue to come. We will just have to wait; only time will tell.

The turtle would be a great symbol for such a mythology. In Chinese tradition (as in Hinduism) the turtle bridges the divide between heaven and earth; its rounded upper shell represents the heavens, and its square lower shell represents the earth, both spheres inseparably tied together by its middle being. Indeed, whether we hail from the Western or Eastern tradition, just as the turtle cannot shed its shell, neither can we humans dislocate ourselves either from the infinite universe or from the earth. This is an important lesson, for although we can travel great distances in the mind (via science and philosophy), in the end we must always recognize a return to our nurturing, starting place in the world. (As one Baroque Dutch emblem of the turtle proclaims, “East, west, home is best.”)

With luck, the cosmic renewal is already underway, the butter churning begun.

 

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

—The Holy Bible, Isaiah 2:10-12 (Song of Solomon)

________________
Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph. D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.

 

 

• If you enjoyed “Turtles All the Way Down,” you may also be interested in these previous articles from Bread and Circus on-line magazine–

• Krishna’s Dictum
• Odds Bodkins

Odds Bodkins

by Editors

Odds Bodkins: Reflections on God’s Body, or Lack Thereof

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, contributing writer

This semester, I’m teaching two sections of Art History Survey One—what I like to call “Caves to Cathedrals.” Of late, my lectures have been teeming with references to historical conceptions of whether or not God, Christ, the angels and saints should be depicted with naturalistic bodies. As Joseph Campbell and others have rightly pointed out, in surveying the major world religions (Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) one can find elements of both: the ephemeral, or immaterial (Neo-Platonic), school of thought and its opposite, the more material (Aristotelian) school. In other words, some philosophers frame God as a divine mystery—invisible and seen only through a murky, worldly veil. Conversely, others believe that God is part and parcel of every living being on Earth, that our divine souls are truly manifest in our humble, yet sanctified bodies.

In the classroom, reaction to this philosophical and artistic dialectic has been interesting. Mostly, students are excited that they can make sense of the duality of highly abstracted imagery of divinity on the one hand, and its antipode, corporeal realism, on the other. Some even seem to have used this age-old question to embrace their “inner art historian.”

On a recent exam, for example, one student referred to a stern, abstracted Byzantine image of Christ Pantocrator (Christ as “divine judge”) against a golden, heavenly field as “his ass up there looking down on us.”

Perhaps like most academics, my knee-jerk reaction was to think, “Whoa! How crass!” Then, it occurred to me that while admittedly the response was completely un-Byzantine in its sentiment, the very corporeal metaphor for God or Jesus just might have some legs in another context—the context of Western European sacred parody.

Such happenstance is extremely useful to me as I’m concurrently busy preparing a paper proposal on “Holy Laughter”. Isn’t it funny when serendipity strikes? In my research for that project, I’ve been reading about the incarnation of Christ as a truly bodily event—a celebration of “God as mud” as it were. Instead of thinking of the holy as something intangible, as the Eastern Orthodox Church fathers did—or the whole of the Protestant Reformation, for that matter—some medieval Western European philosophers, and most common folk historically have thought of our humble selves as worthy of the description, “just a bit lower than the angels.” After all, to them the mystery of the incarnation in Christianity requires that one come to grips with God made flesh. And, imagine what fun it would be to consider a supreme being clothed in humanity with all of its physical functions and limitations. What a philosophical conundrum! What an opportunity for festive humor concerning the lower bodily strata!

As many scholars (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Harvey Cox and M. Conrad Hyers) have written, Medieval Period bawdy festivity and parodic inversion of divinity were heartily embraced as part of the human quest to understand past, present and future, to grapple with change and to find his place in the cosmic order. Such play and release of energy required the temporary inversion of high and low social and cultural strata, much like the true expression of communitas as described by the anthropologist Victor Turner. According to Turner, communitas is the very spirit of community demonstrated by equality, solidarity and togetherness. Communitas is most acute in periods of inversion and change, as in a rite of passage, one that brings common understanding and transient humility.

These rites of passage have been likened to the ancient tradition of carnivalesque feast days in the Catholic Church—for example, the feasts of Epiphany and Easter when earthly kings are toppled in favor of poor babes, or physical death is overcome by a miraculous physical resurrection. (Deeply resonant themes, incidentally, shared by many world religions both East and West as enumerated by Joseph Campbell in The Mythic Image.) These inversions made God substantive and present to each and every person, be they noble, priest, merchant or peasant.

Implicit in these parodic, sacred celebrations are the shared dualities of human existence each person must come to know: hunger and satiety, wealth and squalor, power and powerlessness, birth and death. These are distinctly human concerns. Indeed, it seems human beings have constructed ritual and festivity to make sense of the impenetrable, the unknowable and the unfair. And, yet, many cultural leaders have tried to disassociate from the physical, from revelry and excess, especially our Puritan forefathers to whom we owe much of our current distaste for fun and release.

In his recent book God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything (2007), Christopher Hitchens has hitched his own wagon to a flippant, broadly dismissive, secularist viewpoint. As a monolithic whole, he categorizes “religion” as wish-fulfillment, imposed sexual repression, maximal servitude and solipsism, and a deliberate misrepresentation of the origins of man and the universe. As I’ve mentioned, it wasn’t always so. His picture of “religion” as a grand larceny of personal freedoms and intellect is a short view, mostly informed by post-Enlightenment thought.

Like most Post-Modernists, Hitchens has thrown out history and spirituality without plumbing the valuable resources of traditional festivity and comic ritual; in past generations such parodic festivity served to remind us of what we share—who we are and where we come from, and how we might properly proceed.
Only since the iconoclastic Enlightenment movement came on the scene in Western Europe have human beings have found reason to ponder whether or not “God is dead.” If humanity cannot begin to belly-laugh at its pathological seriousness, so, it would seem, are we.

_______________________

Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph. D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.

Krishna’s dictum

by Editors

Krishna’s dictum: The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself

by Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, contributing writer

Joseph Campbell has been dead for twenty years. I know, I’m the last person on earth not to have heard of him. But, what a time to rediscover him.

Indeed, in a Post-Modern, nihilistic world where “Islamo-fascists” and “Global Climate Change” wrest the truth from the discourse, how good it has been to revisit Campbell’s unifying concepts of divinity found in everyman and the everyday, and an emphasis on cross-cultural shared human experience—no matter the race, religion or gender. I highly recommend it.

If more people thought in terms of Campbell’s “recognizing the Thou”, we could not demonize what we perceive as the other—be it a person or the environment—because in each we would see ourselves and our shared humanity. Undoubtedly, this would throw political and commercial propaganda and greed on its head. So much for environmental disregard, war, poverty, genocide, terrorism and fear-mongering.

If that’s not enough, what’s more Campbell’s books might serve as an overdue introduction to Humanism 101. Writing as a professor who teaches Art History to college students, I’ve noticed a marked shift over the last decade from a general cultural knowledge to what I would term a “studied ignorance”. (Is this a reflection of the values of our political leadership?)

I can’t help believing that a good dose of art, comparative religion, world history, psychology and myth-making would give currently morose, navel-gazing (does this explain all the piercings?) teens a positive moral compass with which to set sail for uncharted waters. But, even in writing this I can’t help feeling that this will never become an item on the national education agenda precisely because it runs counter to the goals of those in Washington. To the point, such a grounding would “unfortunately” result in growing awakening consciousness and philosophical self-examination—not particularly good for supporting the status-quo. “No solipsistic child left without an iPod and Gamecube.”

Already in 1988, in the now famous Power of Myth series Campbell noted that our Post-Modern American society was a culture curiously devoid of myths; and, this was new, not necessarily positive territory. Campbell believed that the myths center or anchor our children, showing them (and us) the way forward, keeping us in-tune with the past, present and infinite. Without them he speculated that we’d begun living in a socially and spiritually-debilitating digital age. I’ve personally seen this lack of both cosmic affirmation and self-esteem seated in almost every classroom chair for a decade now.

Lamentably, in listening to “Fresh Air” on NPR the other day I was reminded that such a positivistic worldview is now absurdly lauded by some as the only “sane” one as they interviewed Richard Dawkins on his new best-selling book, The God Delusion (Bantam Books, 2006). In his view, this scientist pities anyone who believes in a higher being because Darwinian and Einsteinian science has (and of course will) fail to find evidence of one. He believes that Atheists such as himself are intellectually superior and can lead perfectly happy, fulfilling lives of intellectual rigor.

My first question is: if this is so, why do spiritually-attuned people suffer less from illness, and why do they live longer? Is that not proof-enough to a Darwinist that the spiritual serves an evolutionary purpose? Just because science cannot quantify the metaphysical with their tools, this does not eliminate it from reality. As Campbell himself might put it: Post-Modern man often mistakes the light bulb for the light—which is to say, the medium of conveyance for the divine spark. Isn’t it the radiance of our being, including our human imagination, that makes life such a rich pageant? In my opinion, such over-reliance on science and technology (in popular culture, the market and the classroom) has robbed many, if not most Post-Modern people of their great inner-life and beauty.

Experiment: Ask a teenager what “beauty” means, or ask them what it means to judge something as beautiful. I did. My entire class sat in uncomfortable silence for several minutes, not one venturing an answer, as if beauty was unspeakable—or, worse—irrelevant.

We would do well to teach our kids to find their beauty and the beauty in others. This would change the whole world and “find our bliss” at the same time.

________________________________

Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph. D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.