Part 4 (1/2)

A formal metaphysical doctrine-such as the Vedanta and various types of Buddhism--employs, therefore, a negative language in order to convey the realization that reality, life itself, is not any fact or thing, since the division of experience into things is a convention of language and thought. One cannot, for example, point to the d erence between two fingers. One can point to that which is called ”fingers” but not to the difference, since the latter is an abstraction. Thus a metaphysical doctrine a.s.serts that the world of reality is undifferentiated, without, however, meaning that it is numerically one, or uniform. In the same vein, it a.s.serts that reality is eternal, which is to say non temporal rather than everlasting, since time is a concept, a theory, abstracted from memory. It a.s.serts, too, that this reality is infinite, which means not ”boundlessly large but indefinable. It goes on to say that from this reality all things (i.e. differentiations) are produced out of that which is ”nothing” by the Logos, which is wordand thought?

These a.s.sertions begin to sound like theology; but, from the Christian standpoint, theology does not mean anything of this kind. It seems quite incongruous to use the name ”G.o.d to signify that which we experience immediately, before thought has sundered it into a world of things. This may be what Hindus mean by ”Brahman” and Buddhists by ”Tathata” (that.ness), but it is certainly not what the majority of thought, ful Christians have understood as G.o.d the Father. The problem arises, however, because the theologians really want to say that G.o.d is a fact, a thing-albeit the first fact and the first thing, the Being before all beings. Had it been clear that theology was not speaking of facts, the conflict between theology and natural science could never have arisen. But when, during the era of the Renaissance, this conflict first arose neither the theologians nor the scientists realized that there might have been any profound difference between the languages they were speaking. Theologians and scientists alike understood them, selves to be talking about ”objective realities”, which is to say-things and events. Yet-to add to the confusion-the language of St. Thomas, St. Albert the Great, and St. Bonaventure was also metaphysical. They said that G.o.d was not in the cla.s.s of things, that he was not an event in time, that he was not a body, that he had no parts or divisions, that he was eternal, infinite, and all the rest. But it is very clear that with some few possible exceptions, such as Eckhart and Erigena, the scholastics were still trying to talk about a thing--a very great thing, beyond and including all other things?

Thus B. L. Whorf has pointed out that for a people, such as the Nootka Indians, whose language contains only verbs and no nouns, the world contains no things: it consists entirely of processes. See Four Articles on Metalinguistics (Department of State, Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., 1951).

2 This is clear in the Thomistic identification of G.o.d with Being. For the purely metaphysical doctrines of India, as well as for St. Dionysius pseudo Areopagite (from whom St. Thomas derived more of the words than the The confusion has its historical roots in the fact that Christian dogma is a blend of Hebrew mythology and history with Greek metaphysic and science, complicated by the fact that Greek metaphysic was never so clearly formulated as Indian, and was always in danger of being identified with highly abstract thought. Indeed, the Western metaphysicians from Aristotle to Hegel have been-above all things-the great abstractionists, the thinkers. In this respect they are at the opposite pole from any traditional metaphysic, which is radically empirical and non~conceptual. It is possible, then, that the Greeks derived a number of metaphysical doctrines from India, but, for the most part, mistook their nature and treated them as concepts-as abstractions which have an objective existence on a ”higher plane” than material things! It seems to have escaped the Greek mind that a metaphysical term such as ”eternity” is not a concept at all. It is the negation of the concept of time. It involves no positive statement. It merely points out that the notion of reality as extended through past, present, and future is a theory and not a real, firsthand experience.

As a result, then, Christian dogma combines a mythological story which is for the most part Hebrew, and a group of metaphysical ”concepts” which are Greek, and then proceeds to treat both as statements of fact-as information about objec, Live realities inhabiting (a) the world of history, and (b) the ”supernatural” world existing parallel to the historical, but on a higher plane. In other words, it talks about mythology and metaphysic in the language of science. The resulting confusion has been so vast, and has so muddled Western thought, that all our current terms, our very language, so partake of the confusion that they can hardly straighten it out. It may, there, fore, help the reader if we make a brief summary of the types of knowledge involved.

meaning), the highest Reality is ”neither being nor nonibeing'-for the simple reason that both ”being” and ”non-being” are conceptual abstractions-like thing, spirit, matter, substance, and form.

I. SCIENCE. The record or history of facts, which are the parts of experience designated by nouns and verbs. However, ”parts” is already a noun, so that the reality or realities which science discusses remain ultimately undefined.) METAPHYSIC. The indefinable basis of knowledge. Metaphysical knowledge or realization” is an intense clarity of attention to that indefinable and immediate point of knowledge which is always ”now”, and from which all other knowledge is elaborated by reflective thought. A consciousness of life” in which the mind is not trying to grasp or define what it knows.

METAPHYSICS (Greek and Western). Highly abstract thought, dealing with such concepts as being, nature, sub, stance, essence, matter, and form, and treating them as if they were facts on a higher level of objective existence than sensually perceptible things.

MYTH. A complex of images or a story, whether factual or fanciful, taken to represent the deepest truths of life, or simply regarded as specially significant for no clearly realized reason.

THEOLOGY. An interpretation of combined myth and metaphysics (3), in which both are treated as objective facts of the historical and scientific order.

The Christian account of the primal beginnings, taken simply as myth, is without doubt a marvelous tale, full of magic, poetry, and splendour. The wonderful King of kings who was alive for ever before time began, the creation-out of nothing-of the nine choirs of angels, the dark mystery of the villainous Lucifer, the six days of the making of the world, the First Man in the paradisegarden, Eve, the Serpent, and the Terrible Tree,-all this is as good a tale as ever was told, Since Hilbert, for example, mathematicians no longer attempt to define a point. Contemporary science more and more accepts the principle that it must work with a number of basic unknowns, signified by undefined terms.

and ranks with the marvels of the Arabian Nights, of the Puranas, of the Iliad and Odyssey, of Hans Andersen and Grimm. But--one must hasten to say-this is in no sense leading up to the conclusion that the story should be treated as mere poetry or mere fairytale, having no other function than entertainment.

There is no more telling symptom of the confusion of ”modern thought than the very suggestion that poetry or mythology can be ”mere”. This arises from the notion that poetry and myth belong to the realm of fancy as distinct from fact, and that since facts equal Truth, myth and poetry have no serious content. Yet this is a mistake for which no one is more responsible than the theologians, who, as we have seen, resolutely confounded scientific fact with truth and reality. Having degraded G.o.d to a mere ”thing, they should not be surprised when scientists doubt the veracity of this thing-for the significant reason that it seems an unnecessary and meaning, less hypothesis. (An excellent ill.u.s.tration of the point that ”things” are really hypotheses.) Certainly, the poets and myth makers have little to tell us about facts, for they make no hypotheses. Yet for this very reason they alone have something really important to say; they alone have news of the living world, of reality. By contrast, the historians, the chroniclers, and the a.n.a.lysts of fact record only the news of death. They tell us what, precisely, did happen. And because ”life” as we live it goes repet.i.tively round and round-”history repeats itself”-what, precisely, did happen is the best basis for pre. dicting what, precisely, will happen. Such information is, then, the supremely valuable information for those who have no other interest in life than to continue-to keep on keeping on.

Myth does not supply us with facts in the sense, therefore, that it gives us no useful hypotheses for predicting the future-the use of prediction being to continue, to keep on living”. Because, for so many centuries, the theologians have confused eternal life with everlasting life, and salvation with temporal immortality, our culture is utterly hypnotized into the notion that mere continuity, survival, is a good-if not the supreme good. Hence we value practical facts above all other knowledge because, above all else, we need to earn our livings, to adapt ourselves to events, to master the operations of nature, to provide for the future, to benefit posterity ... to what? Obviously, to keep on going on, to keep on consuming and acc.u.mulating, longer and longer, more and more. Convinced that, in this fas.h.i.+on, we are practical, that we are getting somewhere, we do not notice that we are covering the same ground again and again-not because we love the ground so much that we want to return to it, but, on the contrary, because we want to move away from it, to that gra.s.s on the other side of the fence which is always greener.

Yet pleasure and pain are relative, and the gra.s.s on the other side soon feels like the gra.s.s on this side. To retain the sensation of getting somewhere we must soon find yet another pasture and another fence over which to cast our envious glances. It is thus that we feel alive only in terms of the sensation of moving from the less to the more-that is to say, by running around faster and faster. The princ.i.p.al reason for this practical madness is that we are not alive at all. We are dead with an , immortal, continuing death, which is perhaps what the myth means by everlasting, eternally recurring d.a.m.nation.' And we are dead because each man recognizes himself simply and solely as his past. His I,his continuity and ident.i.ty, is nothing but an abstraction from his memory, since what I know of myself is always what I was. But this is only tracks and echoes, from which the life has vanished. If the only self which I know is a thing dead and done, a was, a ”has been”, 1 By this interpretation the Christian myth of everlasting torture and frustra, Lion presents a marvelous parallel to the Greek myth of the punishments of Ixion, Sisyphus, and Tantalus-Ixion bound to the ever..turning wheel, Sisyphus pus.h.i.+ng the rock to the hilltop from which it ever rolls down, and Tantalus pursuing the feast which always eludes him.

speak to us. It is immensely important to distinguish this from any kind of ”subjective idealism” or psychologism. In saying that Gad is the knowing but ever/unknowable ”ground” or source of the mind, we are not saying that reality is ”mental” or ”subjective”. On the contrary, that reality which we apprehend subjectively as mind is also what we know objec, lively as ”things”. It is both subjective and objective, or better, neither subjective nor objective. In the mind-as minds-we are that which, otherwise, we only see. It is simply the point of most intimate contact with reality, and all the pride of knowledge is put to confusion by the fact that at the point where we feel reality most intimately we understand it least.

For I never know my ”own” act of knowing. I do not understand how it is done. I did not create the mechanism by which it functions. It goes on as independently of any volition or control on my part as the clouds moving above my head, or the atoms vibrating in the stones at my feet. I have to admit, then, that it is meaningless to say that I do it, or that I know. ”It” does it; ”it” knows. And this ”it”, whether as the ground of the mind or as the indefinable basis of what our senses perceive as structures and ”things”, is that which articulates the myths, just as it articulates the shapes of trees, the structure of the nervous system, and every other process beyond our soy called conscious control.'

The myth is revelation, consisting of ”the mighty acts of G.o.d”, because myth wells u ntan~ously within the mind i Though I use the word ”it”, I do not wish to imply the singular number, or any notion of a sort of uniform ”stuff” out of which all things are made. For that which is truly indefinable escapes every concept whatsoever. In the words of St. Dionysius, the father of all Christian metaphysic, ”We say that he (G.o.d) is neither a soul, nor a mind, nor an object of knowledge ... neither is he reason, nor thought, nor is he utterable or knowable; neither is he number, ceder, greatness, littleness, equality, inequality, likeness, nor unlikeness; neither does he stand or move, nor is he quiescent; neither has he power, nor is power, nor light; neither does he live, nor is life; neither is he being, nor everlastingness, nor time, ... nor wisdom, nor one, nor oneness, nor divinity, nor goodness, ... nor any other thing known to us.” Tbeologia Myst.i.ta, V.

according to the same involuntary processes which shape the brain itself, the foetus within the womb, and the molecular pattern of the elements. For myth is the complex of images eventually a.s.sumed by all involuntary imagination, since, left to itself, imagination takes on a structure in the same manner as the body and the brain. Thus with their fascinating unanimity the myths tell us that the world proceeds out of the invisible and the unknown by articulation, by the power of the Word or Logos, which is ”G.o.d of G.o.d, Light of Light, true G.o.d oftrue G.o.d, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom (i.e. the Word) all things were made:”

So, too, Hindu mythology maintains that everything was called into being by Vak, which is speech, or shabda, sound. Indeed, the Hindus insist that the roots oftheir sacred language, l ri _are not merely the roots of verbs and nouns, but the roots of things themselves, which come into being by the utterance of the primordial words. In the Chinese tradition the formative principle of the world is called Tao, which originally meant ”speech”, the creative power of the Great Ultimate (t'ai chi) which is represented by an empty circle. Obviously, it is impossible for the mind to recognize any things or structures in its experience without the ability to number and to name-prior to which the ”objective” world is simply that Chaos or prima materia, which G.o.d created in the beginning of time. One must suppose that, for instance, to a cat there is not any thing to be known as a field, containing another distinct thing to be known as a tree. The field is just a state where life becomes green, and the tree where it goes up in such a fas.h.i.+on that a dog cannot follow. Before logic, before the recognition of orders in experience through name and number, there is no thought and thus no things, and it is not by chance that there is an etymological relation between thing and think, as between the equivalent Latin words res and reor, German Ding and denken, the Greek rhema and rheo.

1 The Nicene Creed.

Thus primitive thought is not so primitive as one might suppose in perceiving a mysterious ident.i.ty between things and their names-a perception which underlies the Hebrew restrictions against the utterance of YHVH, the Name of G.o.d. The convention is equally preserved in modern society, where a man who is not cla.s.sified, who has no name or belongs to no nation, does not legally exist. In the same way, modern logical philosophy often takes the position that a term without logical meaning cannot correspond to any physical reality. Thus the term G.o.d is illogical in so far as it is predicated ofall things, as in the sentence ”All things were made by G.o.d”, for in strict logic that which is predicated of everything is predicated of nothing. It follows, then, that if ”G.o.d” has no logical meaning, no G.o.d exists-a conclusion highly disturbing to theologians so long as they insist upon G.o.d as a fact, which exists, as distinct from the mythical symbol of a metaphysical reality, a nothing, having neither existence nor nonexistence.

The moment, then, that the theologians started to explain G.o.d, they began to lose all contact with him. They treated the language of myth as the language of fact. They rationalized G.o.d, and degraded him to the level of a dead, fixed thing-dead because all things are past, inhabiting only the world of memory. Almost from its earliest beginnings Christian orthodoxy began to insist on the scientific rather than the metaphysical or mythical interpretation of the divine revelation. This was largely due to the fact that during the era in which Christianity arose, both the Hebrew and GraccoRoman cultures were much preoccupied with a craving for salvation in terms of individual immorality. Both cultures had developed in such a way as to increase that vivid sense of the ego, of individual isolation, which-ever since-has been so peculiarly characteristic of the Western mentality.'

' It is often noted that the earlier forms of both Greek and Hebrew religion almost ignored the problems of an individual survival of death. The places of the departed, the Greek Hades and the Hebrew Sheol, were realms where the To the extent that the human mind identifies itself with the individual ego, it is confusing its life with its ast since the ego is an abstraction from memory. Hence history and facts become more valuable than reality. Because the ego and its values have no real life, the real present becomes empty, and existence a perpetual disappointment, so that man lives on hope and prizes nothing more than continuity. In this general misplacement of value G.o.d, too, becomes a fact, a historical ent.i.ty, since past and fixed facts seem now more real, more certain and sure than anything else.

It is at this point, too, that G.o.d is identified with Absolute Goodness, with morality. For goodness, in this sense, is the kind of action which we know by memory and experience, as a matter of fact, to lead to survival. The good can always be recognized because it is simply the abstract name for positive content of memory, and ”good action” is the law, the method of returning more and more to the safe ground we have known. Morality is the wisdom of experience, of memory, which cannot tell us how to live, but only how to go on being dead. This is why even St. Paul insists again and again that the Law of Moses cannot give life, that a goodness which is the mere obedience of a precept always presupposes and fosters its own opposite-evil and sin. ”For when we were in the flesh (i.e. the world of fact), the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead dead continued only as shadows and memories. Thus Hades and Sheol were ”the past”, so that beyond death there was no expectation of any real Life for the individual. Early Hebraism distinguished between nefesh, the individual soul, and ruach, the spirit, which G.o.d had originally breathed into Adam. At death the body returned to the dust, the nefesh to Sheol, but the mach, being essentially divine, was reabsorbed in G.o.d. See Ecclesiastes 12: 7. It was not until some two centuries before Christ that the Hebrew mind became concerned with individual immortality, conceived not merely as the survival of the nefesh, but as resurrection, in which the body was restored as well as the soul. Even while Christ was alive, however, the powerful sect of the Sadducees was opposed to the resurrection doctrine.

6.

wherein we were held, in order that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the Letter. al For in the world of fact and past experience good and evil are as relative to one another as pleasure and pain. The good which we remember is recognized in contrast with the evil which we remember. Without evil good cannot be recognized. Therefore, as the mind ever returns to the good which it has known, it necessarily recreates the evil-not only because the two are mutually related, but even more because the remembered good is a dead good, breeding evil as its particular corruption. The good which is not in relation to evil is always a grace t nsaught, a gift unsolicited, for-as with happiness-the act of reaching for it pushes it away. Naturally, however, the mind which is ever seeking more and more of the remembered good does not intend to recreate the evil. For such a mind is selfdeceived, confusing itself with its past, its life with its death, and thus does not realize that it condemns itselfto action in a mechanical repet.i.tive circle. When, therefore, such a mind conceives its rationalized, moralistic G.o.d, this G.o.d must of necessity be accompanied by a Devil whom he does not intend to create. Furthermore, the whole art of this Devil will lie in deception, and the whole problem of evil will be lost in unfathomable mystery. For the origination of evil is a problem and a mystery because man identifies himself with his past, and does not realize it.

Yet a myth is an extraordinarily difficult thing to kill, for it continues to be devastatingly revealing even when one has tampered with it, and changed its form by rationalistic or moralistic interpretation. We have suggested that the Devil is in many ways the most significant figure in the whole Catho, lic myth, bearing in mind that the Christian Devil is the product of Catholic moral philosophy, working upon the earlier Hebrew myth of the Dark Angel who simply personifies the wrathful aspect of G.o.d. For the theological Devil is a 1 Romans 7: s-6.

G.o.d and Satan 7 3 symbol which, without any conscious intention, reveals the whole confusion of the mentality which produced it.

The story of the Fall of Adam foreshadows what the later myth of the Fall of Lucifer makes vividly clear-that the mentality which produces them is one increasingly confused by self/consciousness. No sooner do Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree than they become painfully aware of their nakedness; the shame and the awkwardness of the self; conscious mentality is here revealed in its beginnings. With the Fall of Lucifer this predicament has become far more appalling4 The theological myth states that Lucifer fell because he loved himself more than G.o.d, because he became ins fatuated with his own created beauty. Consequently the essence of all malice is equated with love of self, as distinct from love of G.o.d.

But the confusion of the self/conscious mentality is its failure to see that it is not really self/conscious at all. It is a mentality baffled by what is, in itself, the marvelous and indispensable gift of memory. Upon memory rest all the achievements of human culture. Yet it is not really so surprising that the human memory should be a source of confusion-for the very reason that it is so clear, so sensitive, and so retentive that it can create the most persuasive illusions of reality. To the extent that they are recognized as illusions, memory serves us well just as the mirror serves us well when we do not confuse the reflection with the thing reflected. But when what is remembered is mistaken for what is, for reality, we are as confused as if we were trying to drive a car looking only into the reavvision mirror.

For theology there is, then, a very deep mystery in Lucifers origination of evil. The Christian consciousness cannot understand Lucifer's mistake because it is making the same mistake itself. It thinks that it is self/conscious, and that it can commit the evil of self/love. But in actuality the ”self which we know and love is not the self at all. It is the trace, the echo, of the self in memory, from which all life, all selfhood, departs in the moment that we become aware of it. Selffconsciousness is thus a feat as impossible as kissing one's own lips.

So long as this mistake remains undetected, the mind is condemned to wander in a veritable maze of illusions and shams. Even in its most heroic efforts to be genuine and honest it is selfdeceived, and this comes out nowhere more clearly than in the urgency with which the Christian consciousness struggles to repent and to be truly contrite-to transform its own will. For the self which we perceive in memory and take for our own is always a liar, and nowhere more so than when it says that it is a liar. The reason is simply that selfconscious, ness is itself a lie, a deception, in that it is not true. When, therefore, the penitent says, ”I am a sinner”, his statement is as problematic as the famous paradox of Eubulides, ”I am lying”-a statement which is false if it is true. The problem in the ”I am lying” paradox is that one is trying to make a state/ ment about the statement one is making-which is impossible. Similarly one cannot think about the thought one is thinking, or know the self which is knowing. The mind falls for this kind of nonsense only because memory provides the convincing illusion of achieving the impossible. Thus the Christian peni tent is always tormented by his inability to repent honestly-to achieve a contrition which is genuine, and which does not have the same motivation as the sin. Perpetually he finds that his will mocks him with masks, that the honest act of the will has a dishonest intent, for ever and for ever in an exasperating infinite regression.

Thus it is not at all surprising that the Christian mentality is profoundly haunted by the Devil, for it finds the Liar everywhere--even in admitting the lie. No one is more acutely aware of his sinfulness than the Christian saint, because he realizes that he is proud of his humility-and worse, proud because subtle enough to realize that he is proud. Obviously, then, the Devil is credited with an almost infinite intelligence for subtle falsification, whereas in truth this is not subtlety at all, but merely the endless maze of confusion resulting from an unperceived mistake.

In the end we must face the inevitable conclusion that the most deceptive of all the masks of the Liar is the very figure of the absolutely righteous G.o.d. Not infrequently, Christians have had the uncomfortable intuition that the theological G.o.d is a monster and a bore. Men are commanded to forgive the offences of their brethren even when they are repeated until ”seventy times seven”, but G.o.d does not forgive one offence save on the condition that you repent and grovel. Men are taught that it is an evil to do good works in order to be praised, but the moralists G.o.d demands to be praised for ever and ever. Men are taught that the very essence of evil lies in egotism and selfishness, but the Lord is ent.i.tled to bl.u.s.ter, ”I am the Lord, and there is none else! Me only shalt thou serve!” and is, furthermore, said to have been occupied from all eternity with nothing but the love and contemplation of his own excellence. Granting even that the excellence of G.o.d is such that it is a ”which than which there is no whicher”, so that there is nothing more admirable to contemplate, even for G.o.d himself, the whole concept is profoundly monstrous unless there can be one redeeming condition.

This condition is that G.o.d may remain eternally surprised at himself, eternally a mystery to himself, so that he is genuinely amazed at his own glory, so that he does not know how he manages to be G.o.d. ”Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth.” Only this will free G.o.d from the vicious circle of the great lie. G.o.d is only lovable if he is not pretending to be selfconscious-to be impossible. Fortunately, the purely mythological G.o.d fulfils this condition. He creates the world, and then-surprise!-sees that it is good. But in devising the theological G.o.d, the theologians let their logic run away with their sanity. G.o.d had to be omnipotent and omniscient, and so it seemed illogical that he should not have the most absolute knowledge and control of himself. Yet, after all, it was at this point that their logic crashed along with their sanity. If G.o.d has to control himself, he is not G.o.d. If he has to to illumine, himself, light. And a G.o.d who does not perform the contra action of knowing himself as an object is still omniscient, knowing all things, since he himself is not in the cla.s.s of things.'