September 12, 2024

If people ask whether I’m religious, and, if so, what is my religion, I find it very difficult to answer.  People rarely ask such a question directly, but it arises in indirect ways, and, in all these years, I have yet to come up with a graceful way of articulating my perspective.  If I say, “Yes, I’m religious,” I risk being very misleading, given what religion so often is in our culture.  If I say something like, “Yes, but not in the conventional way,” I just mystify people.  Any attempt to explain what I mean instantly becomes some kind of overly complicated lecture inappropriate to a social occasion.  A newsletter is a social occasion, but of a different kind, and I hope I may make a less awkward attempt at an answer here.

Reading of current events this week, and thinking of the role of religious commitments in the election campaigns, it struck me that religion in America seems narrowed to an interest in this world.  Of course, that may be merely an appearance: political struggles are going to foreground the ideological aspect of religion, and it may be unfair to reduce anyone’s religion merely to the aspect that gets in the news.  But it is true that religion today so often appears to be contracted down to a struggle for power, for control over institutions and people.  And the groups doing the struggling, in particular Christian nationalism and right-wing Catholicism, do seem to have lost interest in anything else except winning some sort of power game.  I do not think this is an unfair inference when they are willing to accept a convicted rapist, convicted business con artist, demagogic hatemonger, and incoherently rambling psychotic as their leader because, they say, it is necessary for their cause to win no matter what the means, and Trump is the means to the end they believe is God’s will.  In my view, “God’s will” is a convenient rationalization.  The real need is to win.

I don’t think it is an accident that such a religion of the will to power is always fundamentalist, for fundamentalism reduces spiritual symbols to historical facts—in other words, to the truths of this world, the realm of ordinary experience.  It vehemently rejects the idea that the stories and images of religion can be true without being factual—then they’re just fictions, made up nonsense.  The problem is that the stories and images are clearly not true on a literal level, and, the more vehement the denial of that obvious fact, the more extravagant the rationalizations.   On a naïve level, this results in Creationist museums and the claim that the devil planted the fossils, but it is a problem that be-devils, so to speak, even so brilliant a man as C.S. Lewis, for whom, as he (and some other theologians) put it, myth just has to become fact.  That is the difference, for Lewis, between pagan religions, which are just myths, just imaginary stories, and Christianity, whose myths are also true. 

Unless I am missing something, you don’t hear much about the other world—or rather, worlds.  Not much about heaven, not even, surprisingly, much about hell.  The main energy is focused upon establishing a theocracy in this world, a kind of spiritual Third Reich that will last a thousand years.  This directly reverses the traditional Christian perspective seen in, for example, Dante.  This world, the world in which Dante lived and was himself an intensely committed political partisan, for which he was eventually exiled, is never shown directly in the Divine Comedy.  This world appears only indirectly by allusion and allegory, and that is implicitly a judgment about reality.  Reality consists of the three other worlds of heaven, purgatory, and hell, in which the poem’s narrative transpires.  They form a mirror in which our reality is reflected and transformed.  Dante accepted a polysemous interpretation of Scripture, in which every passage of the Bible was true in a different way on four levels.  Yes, the bottom level was that of the literal, but the higher levels of the allegorical (and typological), the moral, and the anagogic or mystical transform the literal level, partly decreating its literalism and recreating it on a higher level.  Just as one quick example, the whole final canticle, the Paradiso, is an enormous decreation and recreation of the idea of heaven.  The proper answer to the reductionist who complains, “Where is all this in the Bible?” is to say that it is there for those who know how to read.  That does not mean that anything goes, only that the literal word dies and is reborn transfigured as the Word. 

Jesus himself did not always succeed in getting his disciples to understand in this way.  They were often baffled by his parables and metaphors because parables are parabolic.  They throw a curve, and taken literally are nonsense.  When Jesus said he would tear down the temple and restore it in three days, you can practically hear them wondering if he was a suicide bomber.  When he told Nicodemus that he must be born again of water and the spirit, Nicodemus, an intelligent man, wondered how it was possible to return to the womb. 

Every religion has an ideological level concerned with life in this world:  with moral values, and how morality translates into personal behavior and social structure.  But, especially when a church gains temporal power, there is a tendency to reduce religion to morality, to a value system focused on the here and now.  Heaven and hell then become merely extensions of the moral system and not transcendent realms of experience.  Heaven is a reward and hell is a prison to punish the guilty.  This gets religion out of answering the tough question of why one should bother obeying the moral law since there is no certain justice in this world—well, just you wait.  But religion is not morality.  “If morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour,” Blake said.  Religion reduced to morality becomes fixated on one or another behavior on which its anxieties about control are projected.  In a previous era, it was alcohol and card playing; at present, it is putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms and banning books said to contain material harmful to children.  Such moral obsessions can be secular as well, such as the urge to censor rock lyrics or ban video games.  And they can be on the left as well as the right, such as the “woke” preoccupation with microaggressions of language use.  The point is that morality by itself tends to narrow life to obsessive-compulsive dimensions.  That is because the real and profound moral problems of the world cannot be solved by exerting control, but only by an imaginative expansion of perspective.  As the last line of Rilke’s poem on the archaic torso of

Apollo puts it, “You must change your life.”   This means more than just, say, giving up drinking.  It means changing the very nature of the reality you live in, which can only done by some means of re-imagining it.

Morality as an end in itself uses guilt as a primary method of control, and there is a tendency for this kind of morality—which is what Blake called “moral virtue” and denied was either moral or a virtue—to find more and more things sinful, until finally it becomes clear that it is life that is sinful.  Anything vital and spontaneous, anything having to do with energy and desire, is most likely a sin.  The Catholic Church I grew up in before Vatican II had erected a labyrinth of guilt that covered the whole of life.  The Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth was of course sex, but examination of conscience reinforced the tendency to feel generally guilty at all times.   What am I guilty of, for I must be guilty of something? And if I am not aware of anything, that only means I am trying to avoid it.  The experience of James Joyce as fictionalized in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was similar to my own, and the only thing to do with such a labyrinth is to learn from the imagination how to build wings and fly out of it, which is why Joyce’s fictional self is named Stephen Dedalus. 

This is not to imply that morality is not essential, merely that it has to be subordinated to something larger than itself, and there are only two contexts to which it can be subordinated.  What we have been describing, a bit misleadingly, as morality become an end unto itself, the whole of religion, is actually morality attached to the larger context of the subject-object perspective, an experience of an isolated ego consciousness split off and alienated from an objective world outside itself.  This is what we call normal consciousness, but that is the problem.  It may be the norm, but it is anything but normative.  Blake called it the “cloven fiction,” and regarded it as a sort of stubborn illusion in which we find ourselves seemingly trapped.  Because this false perspective is dualistic, the morality attached to it is dualizing, either-or, splitting the world into mutually antagonistic, mutually exclusive categories.  Because the ego is alienated from everything outside itself, it sees a split everywhere, in the internal world as well as the external.  Mind is split from body, and the mind is divided against itself, as when we speak metaphorically of the conflict between head and heart, or psychoanalytically of the conflict between conscious and unconscious.  Morality then decides that one opposite is good and the other evil, rejecting any attempt to unite the opposites as a lazy or ignorant compromise. 

But Christianity is supposed to be the religion of love.  Love is the greatest of the virtues, says Paul, and the essence of love is connection, reaching across the barriers of the opposites.  However, morality that is trapped within the cloven fiction, within the assumptions of the subject-object perspective, reduces love to an either-or as well.  Such morality thinks in terms of us and them, and love is warm and wonderful and welcoming—if you are one of us.  If you are one of them, you are other, and evil.  Such are the warm and folksy, shirt-off-their-back generous and caring people, whose loving kindness is not false—but it stops at the limits of the in-group.  As for those monstrous gay and lesbian and trans unnatural people, as for those terrible criminals who stalk our cities and tend to be Black, as for those immigrants that are also criminals and rapists and take our jobs,  the feeling we have for them is not Christian love.  That is how we know that the down-home folksiness is a lie.  It is genuine as far as it goes, which is the boundaries of the tribe, the clan, the group to which we belong.  The attitude to whatever is outside that is paranoia, which breeds fear, which in turn breeds hate. 

People trapped in this kind of conservative morality are confusing.  They tend to throw us off balance.  We feel that their warmth and care are genuine and not just feigned.  Yet confronted by the Other, they may say things that are absolutely horrible.   They fly into a rage about illegal immigrants, and the shirt-off-the-back people are furious that they are taking “our” jobs.  It is as if they never heard of the parable of the Good Samaritan.  They never express mixed feelings:  “I know the lives of these immigrants must be hard, and I sympathize, yet we simply cannot let in all of them, though my heart aches for them.”  What they do say amounts to saying about the whole country, “Mine!  All mine, and not one bit yours!”  They love Trump because he lies constantly about immigrants, calling them criminals and drug dealers and rapists so that we do not have to feel Christian charity for them.  We may agree that we cannot let in everyone, but let us pray for the grace to be miserable about it, which might in turn lead to trying to change the system. 

There is another kind of love that reaches across all boundaries, dares to cross the line and connect with difference.  It is a far more difficult kind of love, whose name is agape.  Christian theology is right that the ego, or what Paul called the “natural self,” is not capable of it.  The ego is constituted by a split, said the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the split between it and the unconscious internally and between itself and the world externally.  For the ego to connect with, even identify itself with, that which is other than itself would be to abrogate the very condition of its existence.  Therefore the ego cannot love.  According to Freud, what passes for love is really narcissism.  We do not really care for others as themselves.  Other people are the mirror into which we look and ask, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” and are hurt or angry if the answer is other than, “You, of course.”  Trump is an increasingly advanced case of this kind of narcissistic personality disorder.  But God, who encompasses all opposites, is capable of this kind of love, and with “grace,” which is an influx of God’s own nature, God’s power to connect, we too are to an imperfect degree capable of loving that which is not ourselves.  It is necessary to be careful at this point, for universal love, love of the entire universe and all that is in it, is easily confused with the kind of muzzy, fuzzy smiley-button sentimentality that is really just the flip side of angry narcissism.  This kind of comfy narcissism loves its neighbor by effacing difference and individuality, washing over distinctions.  It is the “love” of a happy drunk.  Real love is paradoxical—and thus, to a skeptical view, merely “mystification”—because it accepts both identity and difference at the same time.  To be able to perceive this way, and thus to feel this way, we must, as Rilke, or at least his Apollonian torso, says, change our life. 

This happens through a death-and-rebirth process by which the natural self is translated, again using Paul’s language, into a “spiritual self,” which, being spiritual, is not bound by the dichotomies of self and other, self and world.  In the modern era, since Romanticism, the symbolism representing this process has become inverted.  Symbols of transcendence such as “God” have often been replaced by symbols of immanence, of indwelling and inwardness.  Instead of God, we may speak of an Inner Light, as did the kind of left-wing Protestantism from which Milton emerged, or simply of the mysterious depthward power of the imagination.  But “as above, so below, according to the old saying, and, as Wallace Stevens declared, “We say God and the imagination are one. / How high that highest candle lights the dark.”  

Religion is not morality, not belief, not even love, but rather an experience of some kind of power in which those phenomena are grounded and which makes them possible.  If that grounding is severed, morality, belief, and love become malignant.  I think I knew religion—the experience that I call religion—best as a child.  Perhaps this is one way of understanding Jesus’ teaching that we must become as little children again.  The experience I had as a child was one of wonder, magic, transfiguration, breaking into the quotidian world at random, as grace will do.  According to the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, religion begins in an experience of what he calls "the sacred,” an epiphany that transforms the ordinary world, or the “profane.”   He calls such a revelation a “hierophany” rather than the more standard term “theophany,” because the revelation is not necessarily of a God or gods, but rather of a numinous power.  In the opening to his book The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade freely discloses the influence Rudolf Otto’s book The Holy, published in 1917, mentioned in this newsletter not long ago.  Otto defined “the holy” as the experience of the breaking in of a mysterious power, one that is “wholly other,” and therefore terrible and yet fascinating.  However, while this certainly describes the appearance of God in, say, the Book of Job, there are for Eliade more positive manifestations of the holy or the sacred.  Therefore he says, “But in the following pages we adopt a different perspective.  We propose to present the phenomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only in so far as it is irrational” (10).

Eliade wrote dozens of books in three different languages, each of which has a different emphasis.  In The Sacred and the Profane, he leans in a counterbalancing direction the other way from Otto, whose depiction of the “holy” is of what I would call decreation, evoked by Northrop Frye in the final sentence of his significantly named Words with  Power.  In that passage, Frye has been dealing precisely with God’s manifestation to Job suddenly out of whirlwind, and he speaks of a “terrifying and welcome voice…annihilating everything we thought we knew, and restoring everything we have never lost.”  The mysterious power wreaks benign havoc, decreating the world of the cloven fiction, but Eliade chooses to focus on the equal but opposite aspect of the sacred, its order-creating power.  He begins with Creation myths in which God or the gods create by bringing order out of chaos, an order that takes the form of the axis mundi, the vertical axis that structures the cosmos into realms of above and below the realm of “middle earth.”  Then, in the middle realm, the sacred orders both space and time, using the original Creation myth as a model:  “It follows that every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as a paradigmatic model.  The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be….Just as the universe unfolds from a center and stretches out toward the four cardinal points, the village comes into existence around an intersection” (45).  The sacred structures time into a cyclical myth in which the original sacred order decays into the profane, and has to be periodically renewed through various rituals, especially the New Year ceremony.  Eliade has been attacked, with some justification, for a kind of mystification.  He falls at times into a kind of reactionary nostalgia, idealizing “ancient man,” who lived a sacred life in a sacred world—in other words, whose life was unfallen.  His critics are right, up to a point, in being alarmed by the possible ramifications of such a view.  For all his vast, encyclopedic scholarship, it puts him dangerously close to the know-nothing fundamentalists who are sure that there was a wonderful world of “traditional values” back there somewhere that has been destroyed by the godless liberals who are profane in all senses.  The political task is to bring back that perfect world, and the end justifies the means.  It is fair for his critics to point out that in his youth Eliade was briefly somewhat sympathetic to the Romanian fascists, and that he never explicitly recanted his youthful views.  Nor are these critics all radical post-structuralists.  Northrop Frye’s review of The Sacred and the Profane is fairly scathing:

For surely the contrast is not simply between the sacred and the profane, but also between the projected and the contained.  Sacred trees and stones, cities at the navel of the earth, a primordial time of the gods, are all projections, and it would be the silliest kind of self-hypnosis to try to talk ourselves into accepting such projections again.  The difference between superstition and religion, which seems to disappear from Mr. Eliade’s argument, is that in religion such feelings are transferred from the physical to the spiritual world, from outer time and space to inner experience.  The development of culture, especially literature, which cuts off the projecting of the imagination by appealing directly to the sense of imaginative coherence itself, is of immense help in the development of a higher religion and is probably essential to it.

One of Joseph Campbell’s last books, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space:  Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, elaborates exactly this distinction between literalized projection and inward spiritual reality.  But I do think that Frye’s impatience causes him to be a bit unfair.  True, nostalgia for some sacred perfection of the past can lead to fascism, but surely not all examples of the sacred as a collective experience are just “superstition.”  Yes, those who idealize a past historical period, such as those who are nostalgic about the Middle Ages, often turn out to be political reactionaries.  But not always.  There is such a thing as a positive collective possession by the sacred, and it would be ethnocentric to dismiss such moments as mere superstition.  That merely returns us to the smug Victorian rationalism of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which foresees religion and magic eventually giving way to science and enlightenment.  Moreover, in his student essays, Frye as an undergraduate himself held something like the same view, except that, as a Protestant, he shifted his admiration from the Catholic Middle Ages to the creative apex reached in the Protestant Renaissance, exemplified by the plays of Shakespeare and the music of Bach, to which we may add the King James translation of the Bible so important to the Protestant valuation of the Word over both ritual and works.  The mature Frye dropped such rhetoric, but not I think the valuations themselves.  The spiritual seizure that produced the great cathedrals and the rest of both medieval and Renaissance art and literature is far more than just superstition.  Yes, it produced ideological distortions as well:  heresy hunting and Crusades, a virtually nihilistic asceticism, and, admittedly, a good deal of superstition alongside the genuinely spiritual.  On the one hand, the quest for the Grail; on the other, scams selling splinters of the true Cross.  Blanket characterizations of entire eras are always simplistic.  Even in the most genuinely spiritual periods of history, some people were merely credulous, and others used religious institutions as part of the game of power that never goes out of fashion.  Still, it seems clear that waves of spiritual energy and enthusiasm swept through certain historical periods, transforming a whole culture, at least momentarily. 

It is true, however, that the cultural revolution that produced the “modern,” beginning in the Romantic period, seems to have put an end to the possibility of collective spirituality.  Instead, we see a growing individualism and, on the other hand, a backlash to it that takes the form of the wrong kind of collectivism, the superstitious kind with a leaning towards cultism and authoritarianism.  The Romantics dared to hope that the French Revolution heralded a genuine spiritual rebirth across all Europe and America, only to have their hopes dashed as the Revolution devolved into mass hysteria and violence, ending in Napoleon as Emperor.  Their response was to turn inward and seek the spiritual in individualized and decentralized private experiences, out of which came all of the truly great Romantic verse.  Joseph Campbell repeatedly said that there will be no world mythology in the future.  The mythmaking impulse will be individualized into what he called “creative mythology.”  Individuals must seek their own spiritual experience, interpret it as best they can, and out of that interpretation forge their own mythology, even if it may scavenge the myths of past mythologies for what they can use, a process that the anthropologist of myth Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage, creation from what lies at hand. 

There are plenty of skeptics who see this enterprise as naïve and doomed from the start.  Imaginative vision and the intellectual power to interpret it are rare gifts, and it amounts to a hoax to tell average people that they can and must create their own mythology.  Their attitude resembles the skepticism of those who say that democracy is a doomed ideal because it depends on citizens awakened enough to be inspired by the democratic dream of liberty and equality and responsible enough to take the trouble to inform themselves through critical thinking before they vote.  Skepticism is always easy to defend, and it seems compelling because we are conditioned on a deep level to regard subject-object alienation as inevitable and unchangeable, as the reality principle itself, and to regard the natural self, with its reflexive selfishness, as equally inevitable.  Yet many religious disciplines as well as revolutionary movements in the arts have taught that the first step in human liberation is to deprogram ourselves of the passive acceptance of a “reality principle” that is really only a mental habit of operating on the lowest common denominator of mental energy.  Not only society but the conventional aspect of religion itself teaches in a hundred small ways that reductive, unimaginative perception and thinking are “normal,” and any challenge to that reductiveness is both neurotic and futile.

The first major challenge to orthodox Christianity, in the first two centuries CE, was Gnosticism, which claimed that what Moses wished, that all the lord’s people would be prophets, was potentially true.  The goal of Gnosticism was not faith or obedience to the Law but the achievement of individual spiritual vision, or gnosis.  Orthodox Christianity was horrified by this, claiming that it would lead to spiritual anarchism and chaos—and also to a challenging of the developing power structure of the Church.  So Gnosticism was suppressed until the 20^th century.  When it re-emerged, intellectuals were again terrified by the prospect of unleashed spiritual vision not under the control of the wisdom of the Church.  Gnosticism was vilified:  it was pessimistic, even nihilistic, because it rejected this world as evil and yearned for a better one.  In its modern form, Gnosticism was not a collective religious movement but an attitude in literature and the arts, and a remarkable number of modern creative artists and thinkers have been condemned because their attitude is “Gnostic.”  It became a kind of intellectual swear word, and in many places still is, not just in religious studies but in literary criticism.  Indeed, Gnosticism has been hidden within a bubble of negative theological judgments as effective as that of the political bubble maintained by Fox News. 

Nevertheless, recently, there have been scholars more sympathetic to Gnosticism, especially Elaine Pagels, whose book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent I recommended last week.  Pagels has written several books about the positive aspects of Gnosticism.  In Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, she wends her way through the intricate enigmas of a Gnostic text called The Secret Book of John, which speaks of a “helper” called epinoia, creative or inventive consciousness:

The Secret Book intends this story to show that we have a latent capacity within our hearts and minds that links us to the divine—not in our ordinary state of mind but when this hidden capacity awakens… But according to the Secret Book, it is, above all the “luminous epinoia” that conveys genuine insight.  We might translate this as “imagination,” but many people take this term as Irenaeus did, to refer to fantasy rather than conscious awareness.   Yet as the Secret Book envisions it, epinoia (and related modes of awareness) remains an ambiguous, limited—but indispensable—gift.  (165)

A bit later, she says:

The author of the Secret Book stresses that the insights this spiritual intuition conveys are neither complete nor certain; instead, epinoia conveys hints and glimpses, images and stories, that imperfectly point beyond themselves toward what we cannot now fully understand.  Thus the author knows that these very stories—those told in the Secret Book—are to be taken neither literally nor too seriously; for these, too, are merely glimpses that, as Paul says, we now know only “in a mirror, darkly.”  Yet, however incomplete, these glimpses suffice to reveal the presence of the divine, for the Secret Book says that, apart from spiritual intuition, “people grow old without joy…and die…without knowing God.”  (165-66)

The elusiveness of “spiritual intuition” is the opposite of Christian orthodoxy’s compulsive need to assert absolute certainty.  Its fitfulness is the opposite of Eliade’s vision of a sacred cosmos of total divine order—and not just Eliade’s, for the Divine Comedy is perhaps the definitive representation of a divinely ordered cosmos.  Yet its tentativeness may be extraordinarily appealing to modern sensibility.  The ground of spiritual reality is downward and inward, within a realm of mystery that symbols may point to, like luminous guideposts in the dark, but never fix and fully explicate.  The language of that deep level is metaphor, which means that it is paradox, for a metaphor is an inherently paradoxical assertion that A is B, violating the law of non-contradiction. 

Romanticism developed a new poetry of meditation, different from traditional religious forms of meditation, that has become the type of modern verse.  It may be religious, as with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, though more often it is not.  But it is a poetry of epinoia, of hints and glimpses, images and stories.  Blake spoke of seeing the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour: in other words, of a hierophany that reveals a spiritual presence immanent in the things of this world, transfiguring them.  “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Hopkins said, but in other poets it is a matter of opening up the world, of cleansing the doors of perception, in Blake’s phrase, turning the subject-object world inside out.  Keats focuses on a Grecian urn that teases him, and us, out of thought.  Wordsworth remembers a field of daffodils, and his heart dances with them. Both Wallace Stevens and  Rilke explicitly attempted to write a poetry that would suffice in the absence of traditional religious consolation, and both were influenced in this attempt by the visual arts.  Wallace Stevens collected modern paintings and Rilke spent time with Rodin. 

When I was young, the moments I now recognize as truly religious—as opposed to the false religion of neurotic guilt that I fell into later—were the entranced moments in a Catholic church, lifted into another frame of mind, another world, by the frescos, the sculptures, the stained glass, the votive lights, and then by the ritual with its vestments, its incense, its Gregorian chants, and, in the early days, the incantatory power of Latin.  When I was older, this led me to a deep love for medieval and Renaissance art, in which a vast, encyclopedic range of stories transpire in a world of wonders as mysterious and attractive as any Otherworld of Celtic or other pagan myth, in which gilt haloes around people’s heads signify the numinosity of the sacred with which they are filled.  This is how I understand the nostalgia for the Middle Ages, even though I avoided the fall into cultural conservatism.  I am also a sucker for the present-day magic of Christmas, and could not bear to do without a Christmas tree, the larger the better, the hierophany of the axis mundi in the middle of a room. I understand the attitude of some of my students, who at times identify as pagans, who have only known the ideologically kidnapped version of Christianity and therefore know it as a dour, humorless, power-mad, misogynistic religion of half-psychotic males intent on world domination.  All of that exists, especially in the more institutional versions of Christianity.  But it does not obviate a Christianity of the imagination. 

The visual arts are iconic: they provide images that become a focus of meditation. A landscape painter tries to capture not just a scene but a moment:  this particular field at this time of day in this weather, a moment that is fleeting and will not come again. I have friends that spend hours upon hours, in all weather, bird watching.  The most avid of them is a botanist, a secular humanist with no use for religion whatsoever.  Yet his birdwatching is more than a purely scientific activity.  He sees birds with a greater intensity than I do, knows colors of plumage, curve of beak and wing.  He would deny it is a religious activity, but it is a way of breaking out of habitual perception, of seeing, as Wallace Stevens put it, not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.  What name we call such activities does not matter:  religious, spiritual, aesthetic, scientific. The point is that they are transformational: the act of seeing with an energy by which observer and observed are mutually recreated. 

Yet the visual arts preserve, in however transformed a way, the model of a subject looking at an object.  Music, on the other hand, is often held to be the most spiritual art because it is invisible.  To use linguistic terms instrumental music lacks both sense and reference:  attempts to say what it “means” usually strike us as naïve, and it does not represent anything in the outside world.  Romantic and expressive theories of music thus regard it as the pure voice of feeling, of emotion detached from any cause of that emotion.  Anti-expressive theories regard it as more akin to mathematics, as an expression of order and pattern even though we cannot say pattern of what.  All these visual and musical experiences are sacralizing: they are hierophanies that transfigure the profane world into something else, so that we feel that, at least for the moment, we are living in another reality altogether.  Conservative religious thinkers often do not approve of saying that anything having to do with the arts is spiritual.  They accuse some Romantic and post-Romantic artists and critics of trying to make a substitute religion out of art.  Such a pseudo-religion would be a merely human product, as opposed to the transcendent absolute truth revealed by religion.  But someone like Blake would reply that the original source of all revelation is the imagination, that gods and other absolutes are projections out of a source that is at once divine and human.  When the critic T.E. Hulme defined Romanticism as “spilt religion,” Blake would have replied that religion is spilt imagination.

Religious conservatives from Irenaeus to Hulme never tire of stressing how the divine is vast and incomprehensible and beyond the merely human.  But “merely human” means the ego-self, Paul’s natural self.  The spiritual self, as Paul said, is “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.”  The transcendent God is a difficulty to grapple with.  He cannot just be dispensed with because he is a representative of the sublime, of a magnificent cosmic power that lit up the galaxies like Christmas trees in one Big Bang of a moment, who does us the hard favor of smashing through our narcissistic pretensions and making us realize how small and ignorant we are.  Even Northrop Frye began to speak in his later years of a need for a “spiritual other” as counterbalance to Romantic inwardness.  Yet the transcendent God is also a temptation.  He can all too easily become an idol to which we are expected to bow down, unquestioning—and thus he can become the guarantee of authoritarianism.  The only thing to do with him is what Jacob did:  wrestle with him in the darkness.  He will lame you, but you may get a blessing.  Perhaps you may teach him something in return, for, as Jung said in Answer to Job, he often seems unconscious and in need of being awakened. 

The need for such hard wrestling takes us from iconic images to narrative, the original meaning of myth as mythos.  Despite the usual doubts of intellectuals about anything universal, it is not necessarily either foggy mysticism or bad scholarship to see in the myriad story patterns of myth and literature the outlines of a cycle of transformation, of death and rebirth into a greater identity.  And the death-and-rebirth cycle is not static but progressive, moving towards the union-in-tension between the Contraries of the transcendent and immanent, the divine and the human, the revealed and the imagined.  We read the stories, we participate in the rituals, which may be either of religion or art or both, and we feel renewed.  That too counts as a religious experience.  Easy to scoff at the Swifties who are filled with joyous energy at a Taylor Swift concert.  But we take our hierophanies where we find them.  There may be a real significance in the fact that a concert tour is titled Eras, signifying eras of growth and renewal.    

Materialistic science insists that the variety of religious experiences are simply the result of brain chemicals producing a kind of natural drug high.  But the advocates of such a theory are not usually aware of their own prior assumptions.  They assume that the coven fiction of ordinary experience is real, sober, undrugged.  But logic insists that all experiences of reality are the result of brain chemicals, and there is no reason to assume that the “reality principle” represents some unmediated truth.  Minus the materialism, this amounts to Jung’s insistence that all reality is psychic.  Jung is Kantian: he agrees that, because we know reality only through the mind’s processing according to the mind’s categories, anything “outside” the mind is an inference for which we lack  evidence.   Kant says that we never know the “thing-in-itself,” starting with whether there really is a thing-in-itself.  But he meant logical and empirical evidence. Romanticism at times went a step further, saying there is another kind of evidence, that of the epiphanies of the imagination, that hint at the nature of the thing-in-itself.  The mind’s a priori categories of time and space keep the cloven fiction in place, but if those might be removed, the doors of perception might be cleansed and we might we that everything is everywhere all at once.  The medieval philosopher Boethius said this is how God sees:  past, present, and future simultaneously.  Milton took seriously the New Testament phrase that after apocalypse—a word that means “revelation,” God will be “all in all.”  The poetry of Blake and Dylan Thomas, and Joyce in Finnegans Wake, try through daring experiments with language to evoke an experience of what Frye called “interpenetration.” 

These are the far reaches of vision.  How are ordinary people who are neither artists nor intellectuals to encounter religious experience?  There is one simple answer:  through reading.  Reading in an imaginative rather than informational mode is a form of meditation taking us into an Otherworld of wonder, of wish and nightmare.  It is an escape from ordinary experience, but potentially an escape into a type of experience in which we come to understand that it is ordinary experience that is the illusion, and the world of vision a world that is, as the Book of Hebrews says, in its definition of “faith,” the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.  Spiritual rebirth may start here, and it may, in a long lifetime of reading, end here as well. 

References

Eliade, Mircea.  The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion.  Harvest: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959. 

Frye, Northrop.  “World Enough without Time.” In ‘The Educated Imagination’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1963.  Edited by Germaine Warkentin.  Volume 21 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto  Press, 2006.  284-94. 

Pagels, Elaine.  Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.  Vintage: Random House, 2003.