Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong: one of the best books on religion I’ve read

Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong: one of the best books on religion I’ve read.

Karen Armstrong was a nun for seven years. She left the convent, partly because its discipline was harsh and inhuman, but primarily because she was unable to pray, and never even came close to the complete self-surrender which was the only path to God (p 9).

She had begun Oxford University in England while still a nun. She did well, but soon realized that she had no ideas of her own. On the contrary, she had been trained not to have them. A clever woman, she could put together the ideas of others, even use one criticize another, but that’s as far as she could go. This reminds me so much of graduate school, where I spent almost ten years of my life (I was a slow learner). At least in the social science and humanities, students are trained to put the ideas of others together in new ways, but rarely encouraged to think on their own.

While at Oxford, she began to experience panic attacks during which she would hallucinate, the world seeming to melt and fragment, faces around her dripping like wax (p 141). Years of psychoanalysis were useless, and eventually she was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. Proper medication stopped the seizures and the hallucinations. But the experience of the hallucinations stayed with her.

It is as though a comforting veil of illusion had been ripped away and you see the world without form, without significance, purposeless, blind, trivial, spiteful, and ugly to the core. (p 55)

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Why the Bible is subtler than Homer or Plato

Why the Bible is subtler than Homer or Plato. I taught ancient political theory for 38 years. More than any single thing I learned, what remains is the insight (hardly mine alone) that Western civilization is the conjunction of Athens and Jerusalem. The way we think even today is a combination of the rationality of the Greeks with the transcendent vision of The Bible.

Now this isn’t quite right, for Plato certainly had a transcendent vision of what he called the forms (eidos). The forms exist in a world beyond time and space; they represent standards of perfection in almost everything and every virtue. Plato has been called a pagan saint, and it’s easy to see why. It was not difficult to Christianize Plato.

On the other hand, there are fundamental differences between the Platonic and Judaeo-Christian worlds. The most important difference is their table of the virtues. For Plato, and the ancient Greeks in general, wisdom, courage, self-discipline, and justice are the highest virtues. Lacking are the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity (caritas). Charity is the unselfish love of others, especially those in need. Plato wrote for fellow aristocrats. The Judeao-Christian tradition speaks for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Today the stranger is likely to be an immigrant, refugee, or displaced person.

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Genesis: the snake had a point

Genesis: the snake had a point. There is more than one way to read Genesis. One is to read it as an account by God dictated to Moses. That seems unlikely, but it’s a view widely held among the very religious. Certain problems, like the earth being created in 7 days, are dealt with by transforming days in eons. Some small amount of metaphor allowed.

Another way is to focus on the structure of Genesis, the way in which it combines different sources and traditions, edited, sometimes clumsily, to tell an epic myth of origins. A myth that’s at its heart is true, not to history, but to human nature. I agree with the second way, but I think one learns much by the first approach for what it says about man and God. I am going to take seriously an author who employs it. “Take seriously” means worthy of criticism.

Garden of Eden. The snake had a point.

The story of the Garden of Eden is familiar. God creates Adam and Eve, telling them they can eat the fruit from any tree, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the sneaky snake comes along, tells them that if they eat from this tree they can become like God, knowing good and evil. So, Eve takes a bite, and offers the fruit to Adam. He takes a bite, and an angry God kicks them out of Eden, telling them that they and their descendants will have to work hard for a living, and women will bear their children in pain and travail (Genesis 2-3).*

Recently I reread Genesis, and it seems to me that the snake had a point. Adam and Eve became fully human only by defying God and eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil, says Bruce Waltke, are intended to encompass all moral knowledge,

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Leszek Kolakowski, socialist and Christian

Leszek Kolakowski, socialist and Christian. Kolakowski was a polish intellectual who died in 2009. He is most well-known for his critical analysis of Marxism, but he was hardly a Western liberal. His political position, and only his political position, could be compared to that of Bernie Sanders. In other words, he was a democratic socialist. When Poland was a satellite of the Soviet Union, Kolakowski was effectively exiled, spending the next forty years at prestigious universities in the West. Even, or especially in exile, he was a leading thinker of the Solidarity movement.

In the later decades of his life, Kolakowski became less interested in politics, and more in religion. It is his religious views that I focus on. If he had a thesis, it would be that without absolute values to guide us, we shall remain lost. Nihilism, politics, “spirituality,” and trivial pursuits will prevail. Absolute values are found only in God.

The five basic values of Christianity

The core truths of Christianity are that God exists and we are wretched. By wretched Kolakowski doesn’t mean miserable all the time, or without happiness. He means that we must die, we know we must die, and while we live we are perpetually vulnerable to events beyond our control.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together makes much sense and no sense

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together makes much sense and no sense. Life Together is based on his experiences at the underground seminary he directed at Finkenwald, in what is now Poland, from 1935 to 1937. From then on, he was a marked man, eventually imprisoned in the concentration camp Flossenberg, where he was executed by order of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo just days before the camp was overrun by Allied forces. He was executed because he was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Previously a pacifist, Bonhoeffer came to recognize that extreme evil must sometimes be resisted by force.

Finkenwald was a community of theology teachers and their students who lived, worked, and ate together. From this experience he learned a number of lessons. Some of the lessons are simple but important, such as listening to each other, and helping each other, which often means bearing the burden of the other. This is actually quite insightful. Other lessons make no sense to me.

The good lessons

Bonhoeffer reminds us that God bore the burden of being tortured and murdered. “Human beings crushed God to the ground. But God stayed with them . . . In suffering and enduring human beings, God maintained community with them.” In the same way, we are obligated to maintain community with others. Yes, others can be a burden, but it is a burden we should take up gladly, remembering the burden Christ took up for us (pp 77-78).

Others aren’t just a burden because they demand much of us, or don’t do their share. Others are a burden because they are different and other. Humans naturally want to assimilate others to themselves, making others like them. In so doing we use others as objects. The only way of treating others as ends in themselves is to bear the burden of otherness and difference, seeing others first as fellow creatures of God.

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My Bright Abyss: Cancer, Poetry, and God

My Bright Abyss is narrative poetry by an award-winning poet with his back against the wall, diagnosed with an incurable cancer.* The book is not thematically organized; it reads more like a diary of a poet whose death will come too soon. Wiman writes about God, and thinks like a poet. I don’t, and there is a subtle grace to his thought that I am unable to convey. Not even the deep theologians I’ve written about have left me feeling more inadequate to the task of reviewing their work. The result is that I am going to treat his book as though it were a set of claims or theses about God, even as it reads more like a poem.

Wiman is an honest man, writing that his return to God has not lessened his terror of death. About his grandmother, a deeply religious woman all her life, Wiman describes “a pure spiritual terror in her eyes” as she tried to answer his question: “Are you scared?” But by then she could not speak. Years later he had a similar experience.

God has given me courage in the past — I have felt palpably lifted beyond my own ability to respond or react. But this most recent time in the hospital, when the cancer had become so much more aggressive and it seemed for a time as if I’d reached the end of my options, I felt only death. In retrospect it seems like a large and ominous failure. (loc 2141)

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The best book defending atheism isn’t great

The best book defending atheism isn’t great.

I keep looking for a good book defending atheism. It’s not easy. Jon Mills’ Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality is better than Grayling’s book, about which I posted a while back, but it’s not great.

Mills tries to do three things. First, to demonstrate that God does not exist. In this he joins a long line of aggressive atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens (2007), Sam Harris (2004), and Richard Dawkins (2006). Mills says he is not a “vociferous atheist,” but he could have fooled me with his remarks about “the believing masses [who] cannot accept the fact that we are ultimately alone.” (p 104)

The third thing Mills tries to do is construct a defense of a humanistic spirituality. He says a lot of good things about finding “intrinsic worth and meaning in living our lives for the present” (p 228), but the foundation of this claim was laid down by Camus and Sartre, and I don’t see where Mills adds a great deal to this argument. In Mills’ defense, it should be pointed out that this is not a book aimed at an academic audience, but to an educated public. Or at least that’s the way I read it.

The second thing Mills tries to do is construct a psychoanalytic argument explaining the need for God. He begins with Freud (1930), who argued that God is an infantile delusion of an enormously powerful father figure. I turn to another psychoanalyst to find a different way of thinking about God. I’ve posted about D. W. Winnicott before.

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Two stories about the natural law

Two stories about the natural law.

This post consists of two stories about the natural law. The first is about an experience of mine, the second is a thought experiment. What connects them is my belief that most of us assume the natural law exists; we just don’t know we know it. A previous post on Thomas Aquinas, deals with the foundations of the natural law. This post is more about practice than theory.

The county school board ethics committee, or “keep your body parts to yourself”

A number of years ago, I was invited to serve on the ethics curriculum advisory panel of a local county school board. The goal was to develop an ethics curriculum for the lower grades. Our advisory panel had representatives of all the good people in the community: ministers, rabbis, a couple of concerned parents, a couple of concerned teachers, and me, a university professor of ancient Greek ethics. What should an ideal ethics curriculum teach?

We never got anywhere. We got stuck at the very beginning. Should we teach students that they shouldn’t hit each other?

“How can we teach that?” said one committee member, echoing several more. “Some cultures value the physical expression of difference, and who are we to say otherwise?”

That’s where we got stuck, at the very beginning. The odd thing about this committee was that nobody thought that students should hit each other, and nobody knew of any culture anywhere that valued students hitting each other. It was just the very possibility that some culture somewhere valued “the physical expression of difference” that caused the committee members to lose confidence in their own beliefs. Continue reading Two stories about the natural law