End of the Reflection of On Religion: A Dialog

The basic thought I have been exploring, here expressed by thoughts like these:

Philalethes. …the naked truth must be so simple and intelligible that it can be imparted to all in its true form, without any admixture of myth and fable, without disguising it in the form of religion.

Demopheles. You've no notion how stupid most people are.

…

Demopheles.  "Mystery," is in reality only a technical theological term for religious allegory. All religions have their mysteries. Properly speaking, a mystery is a dogma which is plainly absurd, but which, nevertheless, conceals in itself a lofty truth, and one which by itself would be completely incomprehensible to the ordinary understanding of the raw multitude. The multitude accepts it in this disguise on trust, and believes it, without being led astray by the absurdity of it, which even to its intelligence is obvious; and in this way it participates in the kernel of the matter so far as it is possible for it to do so.

…

Demopheles. How often must I repeat that religion is anything but a pack of lies? It is truth itself, only in a mythical, allegorical vesture. 

 

I have questioned the notion that the pure, plain, abstract, difficult prose of philosophy is radically different from and superior to myth, religion, and art when it comes to expressing metaphysical truth i.e. a view of Being as a whole or true Being as it is in itself, which is transcendent to us at least because of our dependence on sense perception and limited conceptual thinking. If there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than our sensory perception and intellect can know and/or express in language – which is possible; we may be like dogs watching TV, metaphysically speaking – then philosophy has no privileged position vis-à-vis myth, art, or religion.

      The only access to a dimension of Being that we are cognitively cut off from could be non-cognitive: a set of possible sublime experiences – our ego life is suspended momentarily, there is an eclipse of desire, of ego, our hidden spiritual antenna is activated; and we are afforded a glimpse, an intimation of the world sub species Aeternitas, from the perspective of eternity. It can come from a crisis in your life, and its resolution: 'unless something like this is true, the whole world would be a mistake,' one might think.

      We experience the sublime. Such experiences can always be counterfeit. Such experiences may be powerful illusions born of desire, fear, or religious longing (Sehnsucht), if the world is nothing but what our science says it is. Such experiences can be like receiving something of a leak from a dimension of nature our everyday experience cuts us off from. If so, we cannot be said to know it. It’s not like seeing something through a telescope. To accept it as authentic is possible on faith alone, that the feeling of reality corresponds to something, something that reveals some profound truth about life. But if so, it is beyond philosophy and even language. We have to express it in the best case only symbols, perhaps analogies from our experience, probably just metaphors.

   Of Christ, in the Christian belief God himself comes down to us to ‘translate’ a reality that is to us sublime in terms we can grasp. But that, too, is an act of faith if you accept it.

. . .

   Socrates to a lesser extent reveals God. This is what goes deep about Socrates: even if there is no God, no afterlife, no reward, nothing: he still loves the Good, still practices “a good man can’t be harmed” and “it is better to suffer than do evil” – and that a life devoted to the pursuit of truth and goodness is the only worthy life for a human being. Goodness is not related to rewards or praise by others. If I do a deed to reap a reward in Paradise or appear good before others, it is not good. (Jesus also taught this.) Goodness is a response to the independent reality of another or the world, at least an implicit reality.

   Aubrey Wesley, a 50 year old construction worker and father of two, lept on a subway track to save a stranger:

Next thing Autrey knew, 20-year-old Cameron Hollopeter staggered across the platform and fell onto the tracks. Autrey left his girls with two strangers, and jumped down after another. The downtown "1" train was rumbling into the station. "The driver hit the horn so I knew from that sound we wasn't going to make it," Autrey said. So Autrey tackled the man into murky, filthy water. He stayed on top of his back. Crouching down in a space all of 21 inches deep, from the ground to the bottom of the train, it barreled over them, with less than an inch to spare.

He didn’t do that as a means to get into Heaven. He didn’t do that to be praised as a hero and bask in fame afterward. He did it because it was the only way to save the young man. Clearly, saving a young man at the risk of one’s own life and even family would make no sense unless somewhere in the back of his mind the idea existed ‘he is a human being and the life of a human being is precious.’ A slave owner would not risk his own life to save his property in human flesh. This is not only an image of goodness but goodness coming into the world, in the flesh so to speak. The best philosophy, perhaps, would be to record all such stories – not just of heroic actions but patient love even in the darkest places (e.g.) – there are many different forms of goodness, from the everyday love of a parent to the saintly heroism of  Edith Stein showing love to others in a death camp. And then tell of such people and their stories over and over. That absolute goodness – love of fellow man and perhaps even the world as it should be – is what is common to Jesus and Socrates.

   That reality makes life livable. Makes the world something to love, at least as it should be. Also beauty. Also the joys that imagination can afford.

 . . .

   I have always struggled to believe the things the Church says are essential. My response to the Sermon on the Mount, and even more the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the saving of the adulteress from stoning has always been deep, heartfelt affirmation. Reading these teachings can result in a sublime feeling that I feel free to interpret as being in the presence of God. If the Creator exists, and if the Creator is God (Goodness and Being itself), then those teachings reveal the divine essence to me, insofar as I can grasp it.

·        The virgin birth: I don’t know what to make of that at all, except mythically. God impregnating Mary: if my faith depended on accepting that as some kind of historical, magical fact, I would be in trouble.

·        The incarnation: somehow Jesus – and perhaps Maria – had an antenna to God that allowed a sharing of consciousness, or a translation of infinite goodness into a limited, human form. Only way I can make sense of that.

·        The miracles (walking on water, etc.): logically possible if God intervenes in nature and history, but play no role in how I think about Jesus. I would respond to the Sermon on the Mound in the same way if nothing had been written about Jesus walking on the water.

·        The resurrection: I go back and forth between accepting it based on the testimony of the earliest Christians and skepticism – not so much because it is biologically impossible but because of my problem with the picture of God it presupposes (see my remarks on the “ransom theory”).

 This is a hard one for me as almost all churches teach that if Christ did not rise from the dead, there would be no salvation and the whole life of Jesus would not have meant what it did. Jesus would have just been a good man and a wise teacher; not the redeemer. God had to die and be born again to release us all from Satan’s power.  

Here is the Catholic Catechism:

651 "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." The Resurrection above all constitutes the confirmation of all Christ's works and teachings. All truths, even those most inaccessible to human reason, find their justification if Christ by his Resurrection has given the definitive proof of his divine authority, which he had promised.

 652 Christ's Resurrection is the fulfilment of the promises both of the Old Testament and of Jesus himself during his earthly life. The phrase "in accordance with the Scriptures" indicates that Christ's Resurrection fulfilled these predictions.

 653 The truth of Jesus' divinity is confirmed by his Resurrection. He had said: "When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I am he." The Resurrection of the crucified one shows that he was truly "I AM", the Son of God and God himself. So St. Paul could declare to the Jews: "What God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, 'You are my Son, today I have begotten you.'" Christ's Resurrection is closely linked to the Incarnation of God's Son, and is its fulfilment in accordance with God's eternal plan.

 654 The Paschal mystery has two aspects: by his death, Christ liberates us from sin; by his Resurrection, he opens for us the way to a new life. This new life is above all justification that reinstates us in God's grace, "so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." Justification consists in both victory over the death caused by sin and a new participation in grace. It brings about filial adoption so that men become Christ's brethren, as Jesus himself called his disciples after his Resurrection: "Go and tell my brethren." We are brethren not by nature, but by the gift of grace, because that adoptive filiation gains us a real share in the life of the only Son, which was fully revealed in his Resurrection.

 655 Finally, Christ's Resurrection - and the risen Christ himself is the principle and source of our future resurrection: "Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. . . For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." The risen Christ lives in the hearts of his faithful while they await that fulfilment. In Christ, Christians "have tasted. . . the powers of the age to come" and their lives are swept up by Christ into the heart of divine life, so that they may "live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised."

 

So the resurrection is central and essential to Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant Christian teaching.

   I don’t want to flat-out deny it, but Christ’s truth was accepted in my heart; my heart didn’t need the resurrection to accept it. Great if true! But not necessary for me to confirm anything.

   Moreover, the having to make sense of Jesus by understanding him in terms of Old Testament predictions is not important to me. As I understand Jesus’ teaching as a correction of the image of God as presented in the Old Testament. I can’t acknowledge the Old Testament as scripture, though there are some diamonds in the rough. And thus the aspects of the New Testament that try to make sense of Jesus in the context of the Old Testament also do not speak to me.

    Furthermore, as I have already written, the “ransom theory” makes no sense to me. I am not sure the deep feeling of being born a sinner and alienated from God prior to even beginning my life reflects our deepest reality. True, prior to living our lives we are born into an unjust, untrue world for the most part and are predisposed to understand ourselves as an isolated ego with its self-centered desires. Call that original sin if you want. But that my children would belong to Satan had God not paid the ransom to let his son (himself in one aspect) be tortured to death is a myth predicated on a deep feeling of guilt, of being born guilty. The God revealed by Christ as I felt from those key teachings would not want us to imagine ourselves so any more than I as a father want my children to imagine themselves as born guilty. The guilt we acquire during the course of our lives seems more than enough.

  Finally, I don’t exclude the possibility of a life beyond this one. It would be wonderful as long as it is vastly different from Dante’s in The Divine Comedy or C. S. Lewis’ in The Great Divorce. (I would forgo an afterlife even on the assumption that I were saved if things were as portrayed in those two – hellish – fantasies.) But I hope – and here the resurrection of Jesus makes the most sense – my love of the world, which is largely a gift of those teachings of Jesus I have mentioned, does not depend on it. I would say yes to my life even if an angel told me that death was the end. Harder would be accepting the final death of those I love. Harder still accepted the final death of those who died suffering evil.  These latter feelings are why I can’t think of the possible afterlife as unimportant. And Jesus believed it in and promised it. But it is not essential for me: I don’t love the Good for the benefits I can get from such love. 

  That is my very personal, current thinking on the supernatural parts of the Christian story. It is clear that I am close to Tolstoy. It doesn’t follow that I think Jesus was just a wise and good man, and did not embody something divine. I think he was a leak from another dimension. His life and teachings – undiluted by subsequent attempts to understand him as consistent with Jewish tradition – brought something wonderful into the world from a place outside it.