December 27, 2024

Of late, the New York Times has been in a tizzy about religion. I had planned to write about something else this week, especially since it seems that, in one way or other, I am always writing about religion: it pervades many of the subjects of these newsletters even when it is not the central focus. However, the Times tumult nags at me, triggers my teacher’s reflex to provide the kind of orderly context necessary for any useful conversation to take place. Yes, I admit that my impulse to straighten the room is partly temperamental: there is more than a trace of OCD in my personality. But I try to put my neuroses in service of a larger cause. Without some clarity, we are in danger of resembling the Navy, which just shot down a couple of its own planes.

Moreover, this may be a good time to evaluate the concept of religion because, for the first time in my lifetime, it is possible to criticize religion in general and certain religions in particular without being dismissed as a marginal crank or attacked as some kind of persecutor. The three Biblical religions that dominate the Western world have long been regarded as exempt from criticism in the United States. When in the 1960’s Joseph Campbell criticized Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for a tribalism that caused each one to be confident that it had the absolute truth and therefore had the right to force that truth on the entire world, he was accused of bigotry, and in particular of anti-Semitism. But the era of unthinking approval is over. People are disillusioned with what all three religions have become as they have gone over to their shadow side, an aggressive fundamentalism. Christianity has become identified with “Christian nationalism,” Islam with Hamas and other fundamentalist terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and Judaism with the fundamentalism of extremist West bank settlers in whose thrall Netanyahu is content to remain for his own purposes. At the moment, Hamas and Israel are busy slaughtering each other in Gaza, while well-meaning people stand helplessly trying not to say the word “genocide.”

Of course, there will be an immediate protest that it is unfair to reduce religion to such psychotic fundamentalism, unfair to the millions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who abhor it. I admit that I am not impressed with the protestation. In every survey I have seen, Israelis overwhelmingly approve what Netanyahu is doing, and the Muslim world has not condemned Hamas. As for Christian nationalism, there was a letter on a Times discussion board from a woman recounting how some MAGA Christian repeatedly told her that her lesbian daughter was going to hell. Finally the woman lost it and told off the blessed messenger, whereupon the woman burst into tears. Well, boo hoo. This is the infuriating kind of passive aggressive behavior that MAGA in general and MAGA Christianity in particular use as a tactic. They say cruel things, and then take refuge in the hypocritical cover story that they are just gentle, well meaning souls who espouse “traditional values,” and who are terribly hurt when all those liberals are so mean to them and so close-minded. Crap. I urge people of good will not to be suckered by this kind of manipulativeness. The real response to that woman would have been, “You say my daughter is going to hell for being a lesbian while you celebrate a pussy-grabbing rapist as God’s instrument. Well, you’re the one going to hell. In fact, you’re already in it.” For hell is what Blake called a State, a state of mind characterized by what columnist David French, himself a disaffected evangelical, calls “cruelty.” Trump keeps talking about turning other countries like Canada into the 51^st state, but he has already annexed the demonic State. He and his followers, for whom cruelty is a feature, not a bug, may echo Milton’s Satan when he says, “Which way I go is hell, myself am hell.”

As for the “good Christians” who are not Christian nationalists, why have I not read a single article by mainline Christians bluntly repudiating the toxic form of Christianity that completely dominates the media? Because Jesus said to forgive your enemies and turn the other cheek, to say “They know not what they do”? Who is this Jesus who seems so contradictory? Jesus took delight in mocking the scribes and Pharisees time after time. He took a whip to the moneychangers in the Temple. He cursed a barren fig tree, for crying out loud, because it “refused” to give him fruit. Is there a coherent moral message here or not? This feisty Jesus is in the line of the Old Testament prophets, who were not “Have a nice day” people either. Milton and Blake were also in the line of the prophets, and shared the prophets’ irritable temper, and their biting wit. In his poem The Everlasting Gospel, mentioned last week, Blake says, “He who loves his Enemies betrays his Friends / This surely is not what Jesus intends.” Of Jesus, he says,

He did not die with Christian Ease
Asking Pardon of his Enemies
If he had Caiphas would forgive
Sneaking submission can always live
He had only to say that God was the devil
And the Devil was God like a Christian Civil….
He had soon been bloody Caesars Elf
And at last he would have been Caesar himself

Just a little something to keep in mind as we read about the endless line of people, from tech bros to CEO’s, slavishly eager to promise they are ready to “work with” the Trump administration. Yes, of course there are millions of truly good Jews, Christians, and Muslims who are authentically charitable. In his “brief epic” Milton, Blake in fact personified the conflict of attitudes within himself as two characters, Rintrah and Palamabron. Rintrah is the prophet alone in the wilderness because he refuses to become one of Caesar’s elves. But Palamabron is the counterbalancing mild-mannered spirit of modest accomodation that keeps the prophet’s righteous anger from tipping over into mere self-righteousness. All I am saying is that good people of all three faiths right now should be more confident about channeling their inner Rintrah. Good people are demoralized, and partly because they do not know how to define the difference between true and toxic religion with articulate clarity. Too many are what Milton called heretics in the truth, holding to the right thing intuitively but without clear understanding. Blake in his Rintrah mood had an answer for that one too: “I care not if a man is good or evil. I care whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go, put off holiness and put on intellect.” In Mark 4, Jesus loses it when his disciples are baffled by his parables, and says, “Know ye not this parable? How then will ye know all parables?” In other words, the good-natured passivity of the back-row freshman is not sufficient. The devil is a con artist, and without insight you will be conned. Wake up.

It is true that Joseph Campbell was unfair in singling out the Biblical religions. He did have a habit of contrasting Christianity at its worst with Buddhism and Hinduism at their best. When he did so, the kind of Hindu fundamentalism that Modi is using in India as a vehicle of power had not yet appeared on the horizon. It appears however that when religion goes bad, it always goes bad in the same way. Campbell said in interviews that he was taken as a small child to Wild Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and rooted for the Indians. But the view of Indigenous religion as based in a wise reverence for nature is partly sentimental, not because it is wrong but because it is sanitized. It too had its shadow side, as all religions do. E. J. Pratt, the greatest Canadian poet up to about 1960, has a long narrative poem called Brébeuf and His Brethren (1940) about the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries by the Iroquois. In it, the torture of Brébeuf, which went on for hours until his heart was finally cut out, is described with excruciating historical accuracy. Yes, the poem blindly idealizes Brébeuf’s mission to both Christianize and civilize the “savages.” We are now more aware that the Christian mission resulted in schools in which Indigenous children were subjected to conditions that were in a very real sense torture, and that the white civilization that Pratt admires so much broke treaties, sequestered Indigenous people on reservations where deaths of despair became virtually a norm, and basically was guilty of a kind of slow, disguised genocide. But still: the torture that went on and on cannot be forgotten.

Was it any worse than the execution of criminals and rebels by nailing them to crosses as practiced by Rome, that epitome of imperial civilization? No, and that is the point. To quote Blake yet again, “All Religions Are One” in that what is valid in them is a common spiritual vision in myriad vocabularies, but “There Is No Natural Religion,” meaning that all religions also have what Northrop Frye called a demonic parody of themselves. By “natural,” Blake meant the perspective of what Paul called the “natural man,” which is that of the subject-object division: the ego or subject is surrounded by and alienated from its entire environment, both natural and human. The natural self’s reaction is fear and hostility: the natural world is an otherness populated by demons and enemies—by enemies who are demonic.

Externally, the natural self’s response to its demonic enemies is holy war—which is to say unholy war, for all wars are unholy. Internally, its response is scapegoating, finding some person or group and torturing and killing them as epitomes of the demonic, offering them up as a sacrifice to God or the gods. When it reaches this point of human sacrifice, natural religion has turned into what Blake called “Druidism,” as the scholarship of his time seemed to indicate that the Druids practiced human sacrifice. When Trump complains, which is constantly, about “witch hunts” against him and his allies, it is the usual Trumpian projection. He is in fact the witch-hunter-in-chief, and trans people are the new witches. Human sacrifice is itself a projection: it is the central symbol of the nihilistic deathwish of the “natural man,” the urge to end its alienated misery by an act of self-destruction that takes the whole of this alienated world down with it. This is the unconscious or half-conscious motive driving mass shooters and suicide bombers. It explains the Götterdämmerung mentality of the Nazis in World War III, and accounts for the justified fear during the Cold War that someone would push the red button for the hell of it, in all possible senses.

Given all this, it is perfectly understandable when some people reject religion altogether as a kind of mental illness, which was basically Freud’s attitude in The Future of an Illusion. It is the attitude of some of the best people I know, whose intelligent compassion is the opposite of the cruelty of the religious and which gives me what hope I have in the capacity of the human race to avoid self-extinction. Ross Douthat, another Times columnist, a conservative Catholic for whom the present Pope is much too liberal, says in his most recent column that perhaps secular liberalism is beginning to be disillusioned with its limitations, and hopes we may be on the verge of a religious revival. Clearly he hasn’t been paying attention. The revival has occurred and its agenda is about to be implemented in the form of Project 2025, the blueprint for a sexually-obsessed theocracy, about which we will just say that the authors could have saved themselves a lot of work and simply used Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as their playbook. Christian nationalism is the American form of what Spengler, in The Decline of the West, called “second religiousness,” a degraded manifestation of what civilizations manifest in a late stage of decadence. I myself will not these days go anywhere near the label “Christian.” I used to describe myself as a sort of Christian heretic, but nobody understands that, and all they would hear is the word “Christian.” Until Christianity develops a conscience and begins confronting the real heresy, which is fundamentalism, I will be content to cut myself off from my roots, even though those roots are deep. Christianity is not good at confronting itself. It is better at denial, better at destroying the career of Sinead O’Connor for tearing up a picture of the Pope who was, if not himself complicit, at least responsible for a system that protected priests who abused literally thousands of children. How dare she say such mean things about a man who is now going to be canonized as a saint?

The 18^th century is known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason because it tried to substitute for traditional Christianity a new kind of religion known as Deism, about which I have spoken in a recent newsletter. Many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, and some of its principles are embedded in the foundational documents of the United States. Deism postulated a God who, once he had created the world, sat back and let it run on its own, ticking like a well-made watch, in the well-known analogy. To update the technology, he could afford to do so because within the mechanism he had installed the software of “natural law,” a code of morality that human reason could understand and use as a guide. Good was what was “natural,” according to the supposedly moral laws of nature. The scheme was capable of a revolutionary interpretation, as it was by people like Jefferson when he held certain truths to be “self-evident.” Rousseau turned the conservative scheme upside down. Civilization is corrupt and oppressive because it is an artifice out of touch with nature, whereas Indigenous people are “noble savages” who are in harmony with natural law. This resulted in a split portrayal of native populations. Margaret Atwood, in Survival (1972), her book on Canadian literature, points to the American example of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series, in which there are “noble savages” such as Natty Bumppo’s friend Chingachgook, but also nasty Indians, the Hurons, who resemble Pratt’s torture-loving Iroquois. Looking forward to what would be called Social Darwinism in the next century, the Marquis de Sade said that the real law of nature was the rule of the strong, and that anyone who believed in the benevolence of nature was simply a prey animal hypnotized by the gaze of its predators. This, of course, especially included women.

That is of course a perversion of true Darwinism—Social Darwinism, whether in Ayn Rand or Project 2025, is its shadow side, corrupted by the will to power—but it points to the weakness of Enlightenment rationalism. I think my secular humanist friends, which is most of them, are quite right to insist that humanity is not dependent on religion to provide a moral code of common decency. Religion, as we have seen, is much more likely to provide an authoritarian ideology that rationalizes oppression and encourages corruption. Mindful of the religious wars of the 17^th century, Hobbes insisted that an absolute monarchy was necessary for social order. Without such a top-down check, humanity would devolve into a “war of all against all” and life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”

In reality, it is absolutism that produces the war of all against all. Read Shakespeare’s history plays, where a century of civil and foreign war was catalyzed by the absolutist claims of Richard II, which provoked a century of top-doggery. Or read the news. Dictators like Putin live in constant fear of betrayal by underlings who want their chance at being king of the hill, and we are presently watching the Republican Party dog fight, which Trump is clearly not going to survive. He is not even in office yet and already being successfully challenged by Elon Musk, who does not need to depend on the fanaticism of MAGA underlings. Within a year, if there are no upsets, Musk will probably be de facto dictator of the United States, controlling Congress by threats to use his wealth to primary any member who opposes him. Trump will fade away, which he may be content to do, now that he is free of the fear of prison. Caesar’s elf will quite possibly become Caesar himself. So much for the dream of an enlightened rule of reason and nature. Reason is a precious instrument, but tends to be blind to its own limitations. The 18^th and 19^th centuries produced various utilitarian philosophies in which humanity could achieve utopia by acting with “enlightened self-interest.” But instead, humanity is driven by irrational impulses from a repressed unconscious. The idea that Democrats lost because of the price of eggs is a ruse. The economy was an excuse for millions of people to vote for a power trip that they are secretly attracted to, though it would not be respectable to admit it. They love the idea of a powerful ruler, so much that the overwhelming corruption of Trump, Musk, and the Republican party means nothing to them. It’s worth the price, any price, to be in the hands of the powerful guy, their savior. As Jesus said of the respectable hypocrites, “They have their reward.”

It may seem as if I am unremittingly hostile to religion, but that is not really true. Anger can become self-indulgent, and I do not want to be the dog howling outside the church door. In the opening of The Productions of Time, I cited Sturgeon’s Law, invented by the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. When told that 90% of science fiction is crap, he replied, “90% of everything is crap.” I said that my book was about the 10% of mythology that is not crap, and the same goes for religion, for which mythology is the vehicle. Historically, the function of religion used to be expressed by tracing the term back to religio, which means binding together. This etymology is now said to be doubtful, but what it expresses is still true. Religion is originally a collective phenomenon, preventing Hobbes’s war of all against all by binding people into a community. But that binding, to be effective, has to be on a deeper level than belief and ideology, as expressed in the law: unity cannot be produced by external coercion. The binding force has to be from within, a common impulse originating in the unconscious. The group of thinkers known as the Cambridge ritualists, who hovered around Sir James Frazer in the early 20^th century, advanced the counterintuitive thesis that ritual precedes myth, which in turn precedes theology. People first enacted rituals whose forms emerged out of the unconscious, the myths being secondary explanations, and theology third-hand conceptual explanations of the myths. In the beginning was the ritual act, in which people participated without perhaps being able to explain what they were spontaneously doing. As well ask a bird why it builds a nest.

Around the same time, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life likewise affirmed that the function of religion was to produce a social unity rooted in something deeper than doctrines. People came together around what Northrop Frye calls primary concerns, the most obvious of which is food. Joseph Campbell distinguishes between hunting cultures and plant-based cultures. Each has its form of ritual, the latter being that of the dying-god sacrifices studied by Frazer in The Golden Bough.

The other primary concern of pre-modern mythologies is what Maslow called the basic need of safety. Margaret Atwood’s book on Canadian literature is called Survival because the basic issue in early Canadian literature was survival in a hostile environment of inhuman weather and, in the white settlers’ view, inhuman native inhabitants. The result is enclosure, leading to what Frye called a “garrison mentality.” Mircea Eliade in a number of books has studied the mythological symbolism of the sacred space, the temenos, closed off from both direct danger and from the chaos of the nonhuman environment, providing a sense of order. In more elaborate mythologies, the entire cosmos is such a temenos or sacred circle of order, often symbolized by the mandala image that Jung made much of. One of the greatest expressions of this order is Dante’s Paradiso. But there is always the temptation to fall into tribalism, to see anyone outside the social order as other and therefore as the enemy. Christianity was no exception, with its dismal record of persecuting non-Christians and heretics. The irony is that Christianity, like the other so-called world religions, was innovative in imagining a truly “catholic” spirituality that included the whole human race in a vision of universal salvation, not just that of a special group. The works of Martin Luther King provide a Protestant version of this dream of peace on earth because we are all interconnected, part of one larger identity, which is what agape, the New Testament word for love, really means. Some Christians have authentically tried to realize this dream. When the Methodist John Baldwin founded Baldwin University, now Baldwin Wallace University, in 1845, he not only admitted women but actually went on a successful recruiting mission to Canada to recruit an Indigenous person. Thus, in true religion, morality is not a set of superstitious taboos based on fear and otherness but an expression of connection based on primary concerns. The connection included not only human beings but nature and the cosmos in one “mystical body” which in turn was the identity of a God who is ultimately “all in all.”

When people are nostalgic for the “unity” of the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, this is what, at their best, they really mean, which is why I respect such a nostalgia, even though, of course, the medieval world was authoritarian and far from utopian. Religion and its demonic parody appear together, which is why Blake regarded the task of the imagination as what he called the “consolidation of error,” separating truth from error through clarification until the latter is revealed for what it really is. On the one hand, the Church of the Middle Ages produced the Crusades and the Inquisition. On the other, it produced the genuine miracle of the great cathedrals, as we have been reminded by the re-opening of Notre Dame after years of renovation due to a disastrous fire. Its phoenix-like rebirth has rightly produced a reaction of awe, not just at its survival but at the cathedral itself, as if we are seeing it for the first time. Perhaps we are. The cathedrals are an expression of a truly spiritual vision beyond anything our own civilization is capable of. Their architecture, with its vaulting vertical spires and rose windows, is that of the temenos, the mandala or crossed circle, the sacred space. At the center of the cruciform nave and transept, the still point in the turning world, as T.S. Eliot put it, stands the altar on which the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. The first impulse of the natural man when our spiritual identity reveals itself is to crucify it, to torture it to death in an insane fury of sadism, bloodlust and the will to power. The Resurrection is a symbol of faith that there is something better than our savagery, something that redeems us from above but which also invites us to rise to its occasion and become one with it, however pardoxical that union of God and humanity must always be. The people who spent decades building Notre Dame could not have put into words what made them capable of such dedication any more than the bird can explain why it builds its nest.

Historically, however, as individualism grows, such collective unity becomes more difficult to sustain. Out-of-control individualism is the modern pandemic, worse than any virus. Hobbes’s war of all against all is not merely military. Its “peacetime” form is laissez-faire capitalism, rationalized in Social Darwinist terms. Life is a ruthless competition, and only the strong survive, or deserve to. The United States is about to be ruled by two megalomaniacal capitalists, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but a shameless selfishness has become more and more characteristic of the population at large. Antisocial behavior, from Internet trolling to disruption on airplanes to shoplifting and car stealing, has become pervasive, often defensively rationalized as a defense of “my rights.” People accurately sense the social disintegration but in paraoid fear project it on the wrong targets, on illusory scapegoats: criminals and immigrants. No, the problem is not those others. The problem is us. In his last piece of writing, finished 10 days before his death, Jung said this of contemporary man:

He is blind to the fact that, for all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by “powers” that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all: they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food—and, above all, a large array of neuroses. (71)

He continues, saying of modern man:

His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation. | Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are now in the same condition. (84)

What we have done to Indigenous people all over the world we have also done to ourselves.

Intellectuals usually distrust such language, suspecting, with good reason, that it is most likely the prelude to a pitch for some kind of conservatism, for a return to that good old-time religion, to traditional values, to something that will reform, with whatever force it takes, this morally decayed civilization built by godless liberals. But regression is not the answer. Nostalgia for the good old days only produces a reactionary hysteria that ends in a kind of authoritarian collectivism that is, yet again, the demonic parody of real community. That is why Jung described the goal of his psychology as “individuation” and said that the resolution to our global crisis depends on the individual. All the collective “-isms,” as he put it, are part of the problem, not the solution.

The modern problem is that we have become cut off from our roots, from the source of spiritual experience in a mysterious realm below. All civilizations spring from this darkness and return to it—and so do all individuals. Alienated from its vital energies, a civilization becomes decadent, an individual neurotic. What can be done in the face of this crisis? There are, as I see it, two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive but dialectically necessary Contraries, one extraverted and one introverted, one communal and participatory, the other individual and solitary. The communal possibility is, perhaps, a kind of new primitivism, but perhaps a new primitivism is what we need, so long as it is really new and not just nostalgic cosplay. We have said that civilizations begin as a kind of spontaneous communal expression, born of the fact that human beings are linked on an unconscious level. Notre Dame is world famous, but the architects who designed it and the artists who decorated it with the encyclopedic narrative of the Bible in painting, sculpture, and stained glass, are anonymous. The Romantics gave us our first appreciation of folk music because of the Romantic mystique about the “folk,” the anonymous and illiterate common people out of whom fountained wonderful art when they opened their mouths to sing the oral folk songs and ballads, to recite the folk tales and early primitive romances. In the United States, this faith in the “folk” turned into the democratic faith in “the people,” as celebrated by someone like Walt Whitman, whose literate style nonetheless evoked the orality of such sources as folk song, opera, and the King James Bible. Last week I spoke of William Morris and his crafts movement, based on the idea of a universal creativity latent in all people, not exclusive to a few great geniuses. Morris’s attitude has led in our time to a democratizing of the arts, and to the idea of the arts as forms of spiritual meditation, not just for an elite but for everyone. Maybe compulsive time-wasting on TikTok and compulsive screaming matches on Twitter/X are compensatory, neurotic substitutes for a creative activity lacking in common life.

The implications of the new mythological orientation go further than that. If the spirit is immanent and not transcendent, within us and among us rather than distantly in the sky, the implication is what could be called the resacralization of everyday life. My Hungarian friend and fellow teacher and scholar Sára Tóth has just sent me a wonderful essay she wrote called “Adding Soul to the World.” Sára teaches the art of translation, which she sees as a form of spiritual meditation, saying:

Patience and deep attention are spiritual acts. They add soul to the world. They show reverence for their subject, sacralizing it in the process. They reveal the wonder of existence and of all created things. They dig deeper and deeper, knowing that all beings have inexhaustible depth and thereby point beyond themselves to the mystery we call God. The creation and reception of art is ultimately an exercise in attention.

She speaks of her one son hunched over a satellite he is building, the other hunched over a drawing he is making, of her husband teaching and counseling, of the choir in which she sings, many voices becoming one. For Sára, these are spiritual activities that add soul to the world, which means to overcome the alienation of the subject-object condition, producing a State in the Blakean sense in which, as the title of a song by Canadian folk singer Alan Doyle puts it, “Everything Shines,” shines like the Christmas tree lit next to my desk as I write these words on Christmas Day. These are communal activities even when pursued alone because they are a linking of self to other, whether the other is another person, something in the natural world, or a text, a kind of identification that Frye calls “ecstatic metaphor,” ecstatic meaning “going out of oneself.”

As a scholar, Sára is pursuing an ambitious project whose thesis, influenced by Frye, Paul Tillich, and novelist Marilynne Robinson, is that Protestantism needs to recover a sense of the “sacramental,” which it has abandoned to Catholicism in favor of an abstract rationalism. I was once a rather intense young Catholic, and, to my surprise, the catechism definition of a sacrament is still lodged in my memory: the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. Catholicism has 7 sacraments, but for a Catholic poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins, every act is potentially sacramental, because “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” All these activities are forms of what Blake, in his famous hymn, called building Jerusalem “In England’s green and pleasant land.” Blake built with words and engravings rather than stones, and, in what may have been his last notebook, Frye called himself “an architect of the spiritual world.” He shared Protestantism’s reverence for the interiorizing power of the Word, its power to build mansions in Eternity out of the ruins of time. Anatomy of Criticism, founded upon the idea of an “order of words,” is architectonic, but its order is revolutionary and potentially liberating. Its critics usually treat it as a kind of cultural imperialism, an attempt by a white male critic to “civilize” the savage wilderness of literature—which merely means that they misunderstand it. Frye follows Blake, who said he had to create a system or be enslaved by another man’s—but Blake was a radical, not a neo-colonialist. His system liberates from false order to true order, and is an aspect of the work of Los, the figure of capable imagination, who is at work “striving with systems to deliver individuals from those systems.”

We all build our own Jerusalem, are the architects of our own religion. Conservative theologians who espouse “orthodoxy” tell us we are not supposed to do this: religion is not a smorgasbord. But all versions of religion are custom made—including orthodoxy. Times columnist David Brooks spoke in his most recent column of the spirit breaking in on him in the midst of everyday experience. He has come to understand and live with his spiritual epiphany by combining elements of his Jewish heritage with elements of Christianity. One step further and you’re a Unitarian Universalist, as I used to be. The UU Church has no prescribed theology. Religion as potluck: bring your own.

I think, however, there is and must be another form of modern spirituality, one that leaves the lights and singing behind and goes out alone into the darkness. The solitary quest is the introverted counterpart of the communal vision, not opposed to the happy ending of the spiritual comedy but not included in it either. Shakespeare sometimes signifies this perspective by a figure who stands apart from the chain-reaction weddings at the end of his romantic comedies: Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, Prospero in The Tempest. There is an air of melancholy about such figures. Melancholy as the Renaissance understood it was not necessarily a bad thing. It can simply mean the contemplative life, as it does in Milton’s Il Penseroso, whose figure of the midnight scholar in his lonely tower has haunted the whole Romantic tradition of poetry down to Yeats and Hart Crane. However, Yeats has a little poem called “The Choice,” in which he says that “The intellect of man is forced to choose” between the life and the work, and, if it chooses the work, must refuse “A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” Frye called this nonsense, but this is a rare occasion on which I disagree with Frye. Jung saw it more accurately when he said that the creative person pays deeply for the gift of creative fire, and one price may be to remain alone. May Sarton speaks knowingly of this in Journal of a Solitude, her first account of a creative life lived alone. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

A more ironic version of the same lonely solitary actually leaves the community and goes out into the wilderness, including the wilderness of the urban streets, keeping solidarity with those who have been left out, the homeless. My favorite spiritual novel is William Kennedy’s Ironweed, in which it becomes clear that such a figure is a Rintrah figure. Frances Phelan originally leaves home out of personal guilt, but he remains on the streets for around 20 years partly because he cannot abandon those whom everyone else has betrayed and abandoned, particularly a woman named Helen, who has been used and discarded by men her whole life. Frances has the Rintrah figure’s bad temper—he is quite capable of violence—and sardonic humor. His is a compassion driven by Swift’s saeva indignatio, savage indignation at the world’s senseless suffering.

Joseph Campbell popularized the myth of the hero, but he makes clear that the first heroic questers were the shamans, solitary figures who journeyed up and down the axis mundi, and who were often very much Trickster figures. In his central essay, “The Symbol without Meaning,” he sees them using the mandala figure of safely-contained order instead as a bow, to launch themselves like arrows out into the mystery beyond the known. If you seek spiritual experience, careful what you wish for. The attempt has shattered the minds of figures like Nietzsche, who was a powerful influence on Jung. Jung’s “encounter with the unconscious,” a series of visions—or psychotic episodes in the view of his detractors—nearly cost him his own sanity. Spiritual experience leads to the borderland of the “liminal,” a subject on which previous newsletters have touched. The subject-object barrier breaks down, which in its intenser forms can lead to a sense of everything everywhere all at once. The film of that title dealt with the condition through comedy, including a world in which people had hot dogs for fingers. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books also provide a satiric version of a topsy-turvy world.

But Frye was fond of reading what he called “kook books,” non-scholarly books about mythology that he often found more useful than the standard scholarship precisely because the kooks did not insulate themselves from the reality-deconstructing power of their vision, which sometimes deconstructed their own minds as well. The original kooks were the Gnostics. The Gnostics took seriously Moses’ wish that all the Lord’s people become prophets. For them, religion was not an institutional Church grounded in blind faith: their goal was gnosis, individual spiritual epiphany or illumination. The Gnostic scriptures, unlike the Old and New Testaments, never really tell stories. Narrative does not move forward but exfoliates, as characters metamorphose in dreamlike fashion into other characters and entire realms of being are nested within one another like Russian dolls. Blake’s Prophecies are cast in this mode, as are the dialogues in Jung’s Red Book. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake provides perhaps the ultimate satiric version of what Frye has called “interpenetration.” When God says to Job, “You cannot judge me because you cannot understand me,” we have to admit that we see what he means. Of what use is this mode of vision? The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote an 8000-page manuscript called The Exegesis based on his own series of suchlike visions. It perhaps shows that it is a bad idea to read the Gnostics under the influence of a hell of a lot of drugs. Dick suffered through several episodes of being pretty much unhinged.

This is the mode of the spiritual that the Romantics called the sublime, contrasting it with the beautiful. It is not, after all, so far out as all that: our dreams are rarely beautiful, but are usually touched with the weirdness of the sublime, which is always one step away from the ridiculous. Yet the point of the heroic quest is not to stay in the Otherworld but to return, even if scarred by the terrible intensity of the experience, like Tolkien’s Frodo, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, like Melville’s Ishmael. The nostos or return is part of the myth, starting with Odysseus, that first quester through realms of strangeness. And what the heroes return to tell us is that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by the genuinely good but limited Horatios of the world. The goal of the quest is eyes expanding to the limits of the imagination. We cannot remain staring into the sublime vision, magnificent as it is. We need to come back home, as Odysseus does to Penelope and Telemachus, as even Francis Phelan does to his wife and family. We need human warmth and community, friends and lovers, art and beauty and conversation. But we also know that, if we walk outdoors for a moment, leaving the light and the conversation behind, the stars glitter with a mystery beyond truth or beauty, and that is also part of the story. The spirit is here and now, present in the slightest touch of another’s hand, and it is also transcendent, beyond us and glorious.

Reference

Jung, C. G. “Approaching the Unconscious.” In Man and His Symbols. John Freeman, Coordinating Editor. Dell, 1964. 1-95.

Sára Tóth’s “Adding Soul to the World” is at present only published in Hungarian. My thanks to her for trusting me to make good use of it.