De Novo

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.

Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.

– Song of Solomon 1:2, 5, 15-16

The above image, from the Buddhist tantric tradition, is allegorical in exactly the same way that Song of Solomon is allegorical: while superficially erotic, the image illustrates the yearning of the temporal and finite (female) for the eternal and infinite (male).  The Christian tradition views mankind as the Bride of Christ; the Buddhist tradition views the seeker as the temporal incarnation of an eternal force.  Each one expresses the same root tension inherent in our condition.

[Early Hillel] rabbis liked to point out that King Solomon used three thousand parables to illustrate every single verse of the Torah, and could give a thousand and five interpretations of each parable — which meant that there were three million, fifteen thousand possible expositions of each unit of scripture!

Indeed, a text that could not be radically reinterpreted to meet the needs of the day was dead; the written words of scripture had to be revitalized by constant exegesis.  Only then could they reveal the divine presence latent within God’s Torah.

– Karen Armstrong: The Bible: A Biography, p. 82

One serious implication of the “democratization” of the post-Lutheran Protestant movement is a tendency toward populist exegesis of scripture.  This has given rise to an unprecedented degree of overt literalism in interpretation; naturally so, since the literal, surface-level reading is the most obvious level of meaning, and the easiest to grasp.  But when the Bible, or any holy text, is approached not as a mystery to be contemplated and studied over a lifetime, but rather as a quick reference guide to life’s ills with easy, one-size-fits-all answers ready for any situation, time, or place, we can avoid uncomfortable reflection about ourselves and the fact that our first impulse in a situation isn’t always the right one.  The Bible: Use it to confirm what you already know.  Anything beyond that is too much work.

The two hemispheres of the human brain

The alchemical androgyne, from the Rosarium Philosophorum (1550); note the sun and moon symbols.  The central task of alchemy is solve et coagula, “distill and combine”, meaning that sulfur and quicksilver (solar/masculine and lunar/feminine) elements are to be distilled to purity, then recombined to create alchemical “gold”.

Ardhanarishvara, or the viewing of the androgynous deity composed of Shiva and his consort Shakti/Parvati (commonly viewed as male and female halves of the same deity).  They are accompanied by a lion and a bull, which are symbols, respectively, of the solar and lunar; in contrast to the European conception, however, Shiva is seen as a “moon-man”, while Parvati is a “sun-woman”, thus emphasizing the divisions within divisions.

Since the eighteenth century, science has debated about the many inherent dualisms woven throughout the human brain and nervous system … These dualities are probably not a surprise to most people.  We need polarities in order to modulate our attention and behavior in response to environmental cues.  Sometimes we need excitation and sometimes rest, sometimes intellectual and sometimes emotional intelligence, sometimes solitude and sometimes community… The key to health seems to be fluidity…

…

The problems inherent in a polarized dualism must have been evident [by the 6th century BCE], as we find Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 540-480) warning of the dangers. The opposites, he said, cannot be divided – rather the universe is made up of the opposites in interplay.  Without dark we don’t understand light, without absence we cannot grasp presence, without evil we can’t understand good.  Herclitus made it his life’s message to show that “human desire inevitably is imprisoned within the structure of opposition.”  Ignorant people strive only for what they see as “good” without recognizing that good and evil are inseparable.  Lao Tzu, a contemporary of Heraclitus, likewise taught that dark and light, yin and yang, are intertwined, and the ego’s attempt to treat them separately, or favor one over the other, is the source of error and conflict.

– Dr. Stephen Larsen: The Fundamentalist Mind, pp. 31 & 97 (Quest: 2007)

Finding many popular secular critiques of “religion” as lacking in thought, substance, and reflection as a dog barking at the ocean, lately I’ve been reading Burton Mack’s The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy for a grasp on early Christian origins.  He evaluates the current terrain of New Testament studies, littered with apologists looking for the “real” Jesus, and concludes that a new approach is needed.  He then proceeds to lay out a 5-point theory of religion that goes quite far in describing the shape of the terrain of religious understanding that we are now exploring in the context of mythic thinking and social theory.  This extended quote is worth the read (pp. 67-70):

To account for the emergence of Christianity, including the formation of groups and congregations, the development of their various practices and rituals, the production of their mythologies, and the writing of their literature requires a radical shift in thinking and theory. That is because the theory of religion implicit in the field cannot even ask about, much less account for the motivations involved in the investments early Christians made in their new associations.  To account for the data that now confronts the New Testament scholar, a theory of religion is needed that can explain Christian origins as a thoughtful, collective human construction, instead of the result of human response to an overwhelming activity on the part of a god.  Only a theory that gives the people their due, a theory firmly anchored in a social and cultural anthropology, capable of sustaining a conversation with the humanities, can do that.

There are some common features to the many theories of religion now being formulated and tested in the humanities.  I would like to suggest five such features that, taken as a set, provide a perspective on religion that can be used as a kind of lens or working hypothesis for getting started on a collaborative redescription project.

(1) Religion is a social construct.  The notion of personal religious experience is inadequate as a point of departure for defining religion or developing a theory of religion.  That individuals have religious experiences is not in doubt.  But individuals in any culture experience religion in many different ways.  The more interesting phenomena are the myths, rituals, symbols, beliefs and patterns of thinking that are shared by a people.  These cultural constructs can be experienced and manipulated in a variety of ways by individuals, but it is their self-evident status as common cultural coin that marks them as the religion of a people.  … We need to ask about the reasons for and the processes whereby their myths and rituals were first constructed and agreed upon, and how they came to be taken for granted.  It is the social factor, the possibilities and rewards for coming to these agreements as groups in the context of a social history rife with other peoples, groups, and religions, that we need to understand.

(2) Social formation defines the human enterprise.  Constructing societies large and small is what people do.  It is a fragile, collective craft requiring enormous amounts of negotiation, experimentation, living together, and talking.  And it invariably results in very complex arrangements of relationships, agreements reached on better and less better ways to do things, and practices established to pass on the knowledge and skills accumulated in the process.  Social formation is hard work, creates as many tensions as rewards, and is overkill if thought of simply as a strategy for survival.  But despite the risks and repeated disasters, watching each other and talking about each other is what we humans find most interesting.  If so, a social anthropology will be required to counter the endemic personalisms that pervade Christian mentality, and ask about the reasons for and the processes whereby early Christian myths and rituals were first conceived and agreed upon.  What if the Jesus schools and christos groups were attractive as intentional experiments in social formation and mythmaking?

(3) Myths are more than fascinating fantasies, fuzzy memories, misguided science, or collective debris.  Myths acknowledge the collective gifts and constraints of the past and create a space for thinking critically about the present state of a group’s life together. Myths are good for creating marvelous narrative worlds in which to stretch the imagination and work out theoretical equations.  They are also good for defining a group’s place and identity in relation to a larger world.  This view of myth means that early Christians may not have entertained fantastic mythologies because they were overwhelmed by encounters with a god or a son of God, but because they wanted to comprehend and justify the investments in social formations for which only a god could render an account.  That is what myths can do.  So the questions to ask of these early Christians have to do with what social intelectual benefits they got from the way they dared to imagine their pasts and their worlds the way they did.

(4) Rituals are more than divine placations or magical attempts to channel the powers of the gods.  Rituals are the way humans concentrate attention on some activity or event of some significance to a group, and observe its performance apart from normal practice.  Much can happen at a ritual, for rituals are social occasions, require roles, invite attendance, display skills, confirm loyalties, trigger commitments, evoke thoughtfulness, and reconstitute the structure of a group.  In the case of Christian origins, then, it will be important to know what activities were chosen for ritual performance, why they were chosen, how they were performed, and what such observance may have achieved for the group.  I can’t resist the temptation to remark that, as far as I can tell, the supper texts in the New Testament were not taken as scripts for “reenactment” until the third century.  If so, scholar of Christian origins have a wonderfully elongated process of ritualization to describe and an interesting quest for theory to explain it.

(5) Mythmaking and social formation go together.  In a stable situation, where pressure to chnge a way of life is not serious, a people’s myths and social structure may not need constant tinkering.  But when circumstances change and the social fabric tears, and especially in the case of a clash of cultures, the pace quickens, for the older plots will need revision and the social structure will need repair.  Experimentation and bricolage mark the ways in which myths get rearranged and groups reform. Except for the case of an obvious pathology, even the most daring social experiments and the most fantastic mythic constructs turn out to be thoughtful and constructive attempts to regain sanity in a social situation that threatens human well-being.  In the case of early Christians, this proposition means that the making of their myths and the processes of forming social groups should be looked at together as constructive and thoughtful human activities.  And whenever there is a chance to catch sight of both mythmaking and social formation happening at the same time in the same place, the relationship of one to the other should be explored.

It saddens me to see so many atheists bashing their heads against the wall, unaware that the processes of social formation and mythmaking outlined above likewise apply to them.  Religion – and Christianity – makes perfect sense when you realize that people believe in these systems in spite of, not because of, logic, reason, and facts; the social benefits of opting in to the mythic systems of a welcoming community overwhelm the benefits of cold, hard, solitary logic.  We are social creatures, and any “ism” that fails to address the human desire for community will utterly fail, no matter how many facts it has on its side.