The Idea of the Unholy

In the aftermath of last month's Zarathustra Speaks essay, about the meaning and value of Halloween, at least as I understand it, my wife Carol got herself involved in a fruitful conversation (frustrating as it may have seemed at the moment) over the ostensible sacredness of Halloween. She was discussing the matter with a columnist for our town newspaper, a man active politically and religiously. Carol and I share many of his conservative political views but not his theological opinions. He sure does not share ours! But I admired his consistency. He not only dismissed Halloween as unimportant, he threw Christmas and Easter into the dustbin along with it! All these holidays, he averred, had pagan origins, and Christians ought not have anything to do with them. Of course he endorsed the idea that the birth, death, and resurrection of the Christian savior were something to rejoice in. But that's no reason for all these expensive occasions. (No, he didn't mutter "Bah! Humbug!")

I thought at once of a conversation I had nearly twenty years before with a Southern Baptist minister whose toleration, cultural pursuits, and sense of humor defied the stereotypes. A fine fellow.  He mentioned to me that the idea of the liturgical year left him cold. It seemed like a pointless charade to pretend, during Advent, that Christ is coming to us in some way he hadn't been the day before Advent starts when it is some other season of the church calendar. What is the point? he reasoned. Don't Christians believe Christ came once, made a difference in the world, and that ever since it has been our responsibility to get busy continuing his work? In the meantime there is no reason to waste time pretending that we are going down the Time Tunnel to participate in the events of redemptive history as if they were not already fully accomplished. Roman Catholics have always maintained that in the weekly sacrament they are "re-presenting" the one-time sacrifice of Jesus to provide ever-new opportunities for us to tap into the grace dispensed then. Protestants seem not to get this, maintaining to the contrary that the Catholic Mass is a vain and insidious attempt to offer the sacrifice of Jesus Christ all over again, as if it had not really sunk in, done its thing, the first time. Else why would all this repetition be necessary? (That, we may note, is precisely the logic of the Epistle to the Hebrews when it argues that the old Levitical sacrifices were well supplanted by the cross of Christ. They must not have worked if they had to repeat it frequently.

Thus Protestants lost any sense of Sacred Space and Sacred Time, those universal, archetypal features of the religious instinct underlying the religious expressions of all cultures, ancient and modern. These elements Protestants sought to excise from religion with the slashing knife of Rationalism, the weapon they wielded so effectively against Medieval Catholic dogma/superstition (if one could tell the difference, hence the need for the house-cleaning). No more Virgin Mary or saints bridging the gap between heaven and earth so densely as to require Air Traffic Control. Let Jesus, mighty as Atlas, uphold the vault of heaven by himself. The Eucharist did not change the substance of food into the body and blood of Christ. "Hoc est corpum Christi" became laughable hocus pocus. Esoteric meanings were banished from scripture, which must henceforth be read by strict secular methods even if divinely inspired. This process of rationalizing is what Durkheim called "the disenchantment of the world."

Once Protestants had dispensed with the rest of the forest of mediators, the Jew and the Muslim, one may suspect, looked on from the sidelines, betting on how long, if ever, it would take the Protestants to realize that Jesus was as little necessary as a go-between as Mary and Saint Christopher had been. In fact, it wasn't very long at all before advancing rationalism led Unitarians to reject the Popish "mystery" of the Trinity and to return to Ethical Monotheism. And then into Religious Humanism, and then to Paul Beattie, who famously proclaimed "Secular Humanism is my religion." But by this time, only a few runners were left at the finish line of the race to reason. Most of the rest had long since fallen by the wayside, huffing and puffing the increasingly thin theological air. The Baptists lie maybe half-way. In a sense, they had already succumbed to rationalism. It isn't immediately apparent because they retained so much belief in supernaturalism.

In an important sense, no room for Mystery remains in Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist Protestantism, what one might call "the lowest common denomination." It is the result of the belief on "propositional revelation." That is, in scripture God has disclosed privileged "information unavailable to the mortal man" (as Paul Simon sang). It is as if a new telescope, or even space visitors, had imparted vital new information. Picture a cure for cancer or the news of an approaching asteroid. Very important, life and death information. But sacred? If he existed, would Superman be holy? Or just important?

Protestants are logocentric, totally into the cognitive aspect of religion. They have information, and they mean to act on it. And to talk about it. Endlessly. That is why the pulpit, the lectern, is central in their churches, with the communion table off to the side. The sacraments are mere vestiges. Fundamentalists are as impatient with them as Unitarians, and for the same reason. Both are interested only "the facts, just the facts, ma'am." They just have different sets of ostensible facts, albeit held with the same zeal. You may be sure Baptists would be baptizing nobody if they didn't read the command to do so in scripture. Likewise holy communion.

Thinkers like Friedrich Schleiermacher tried to isolate the nature of religion, to delineate the unique character of religious experience. What is piety? What is uniquely religious about religion? It cannot be ethics, as Kant maintained, because religion adds nothing to morality and is not constituted by it. It is a mystery unto itself. Nor can it be equivalent to knowledge. Something eerier and more spine-tingling, something more fulfilling to the soul is going on in religion. No, piety transcends, while including, both ethics and knowledge. This set of distinctions came in quite handy when the Higher Criticism demonstrated that the Bible could no longer be relied upon to dispense hitherto-hidden knowledge as believers once imagined. Without the old belief in supernatural revelation of the information necessary to be saved, religion could still go on, basing itself, as it always should have, on the basic experience of awe and wonder, of humble receptivity.

But today's fundamentalists still imagine themselves the recipients of revealed knowledge ("propositions"), which they take very seriously, anxiously striving to convey it to everyone around them (an amazing irony, since they inhabit a culture already thoroughly familiar with it). It is all cognitive. "Mystery" for them refers not to conditions, entities, feelings transcending reason, but merely to problems the solution to which God has not yet provided (but he will in a vast seminar once we reconvene in heaven!). Sacred Time? Sacred Space? Cyclical reliving of the holy past? These things are mere charades to the rationalist Protestant, as they would be to the political scientist or the economist or the biologist. Such religionists believe in God, but not in the Sacred. It is peculiar. It is ironic. It is tragic.

Schleiermacher believed in religious experience, but not in revealed knowledge. Oh, one might (indeed must) infer certain things about God from our experiences of him. But one could not dogmatize. He called himself an "agnostic pietist." He did not look beyond the limits of the normal and the natural to see God at work. Instead, he said, "To me, all is miracle." One might say that rationalistic fundamentalism has erased the Sacred, making even revelation essentially secular: vital information, like news about global warming. In turn, Schleiermacher erased the secular, making everything, all experience, sacramental: material conveyances of spiritual experience. He was influenced by Spinoza, though he didn't think he had followed Spinoza all the way into Pantheism, the doctrine that all things are faces/revelations of God, who is their inmost nature. The religious person learns to read the rarified aura of divine holiness in all things, where the unenlightened see only the mundane, only junk punctuated with fool's gold.

Pantheism was Stoic in origin. These ancient Greek and Roman philosophers taught that Zeus was not a personal being but rather an all-permeating Logos-mist, living and governing at the heart of all things, creating a sublime harmony of destiny and virtue which the worldly man need only strive to recognize in order to see all things in the inner-radiating light of their own divine dignity. Leibniz postulated a related model of reality according to which the world is composed of tiny monads (units) endlessly and perfectly reflective of one another, resulting in a universal harmony. It was with reference to Leibniz that Ira Progoff (in Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny) tried to unpack the implication of Carl Jung's theory of Synchronicity, the acausal principle of connection. Jung sought to explain the striking, meaningful coincidences we occasionally experience. Progoff proposed that we take seriously Leibniz's "monadology" system: everything is in fact coordinated, and instances of Synchronicity are momentary flashes that make visible small portions of that coordination, if only to assure us that it is there.

The whole thing, a sublime vista of cosmic order, is the Sacred, for Meaning is Sacred. The monadology is Sacred Space. Mere information, no matter how vital, no matter how surprising, is not sacred and cannot be.

So says Zarathustra.