Justice Versus Chaos

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris) discusses Jesus' temptation in the desert by the devil at some greater length than the actual story that is presented in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The version of Matthew 4, verses 1 through 11, is perhaps the longest and most canonical one.

Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist and heard a voice from heaven saying, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." He has accordingly consented to hitch his personal destiny to the living out of a text, specifically, the first Servant Song of the Book of Isaiah as cited by Matthew 12:8: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles."

Before that can happen, though, Jesus must be tested. Like all who attempt to live by a book, he must receive a second baptism, that of fire and Spirit. It is only thus that he, the Son of God, can fully identify with human weakness while still embodying the Word.

So Jesus fasts in the desert for forty days, led or driven there by the Spirit of God, and is tempted thrice by Satan. Satan first tempts him by seeing whether, in his grievous hunger, he will easily abandon the Word in order to assuage his nagging appetite by turning the very stones into loaves of bread. Jesus passes this test: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."

Changing tactics as befits his role as spiritus vertiginis, the spirit of confusion, Satan then tempts Jesus to do the exact opposite: to dismiss the reality of the physical world in which bread is necessary at all. Satan recommends that Jesus be like an angel and soar across the sky. But Jesus rejects the implicit bifurcation of his bodily experience: "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."

Jesus is in danger of being torn in two by competing extremes — fidelity to the Word, and giving in to the necessities of life in the material world. The sciences of chaos have shown that bifurcation, pressed to the extreme, can in fact turn order to chaos.

King is spot on here: "The mind becomes a whirligig of identities: at one moment one is a bodily appetite and the ideal does not count, then one identifies with the ideal and the body does not count. The mind is caught in a witch's dance — a dance wherein one does not know if he is there and the witch is absent, or if the witch is there and he is absent. Half-real identities alternate with increasing rapidity." Such is the run-up to total chaos, science shows.

Satan's third temptation is thus his most cunning: cynical acquiescence in the chaos of a whirligig world. Satan urges Jesus to, as his worshipful viceroy, seize power over the nations. Instead of proclaiming a single justice to the Gentiles — to the "nations," in the Jewish term — he will merely rule them, one and all, in their disunited multiplicity.

But the science of chaos also shows that there is a hidden new order that can emerge out of sheer chaos, if it is pressed to extreme — a third way between the horns of the dilemma of Word versus world, as it were. Jesus found that way when he refused to kneel to Satan: "You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve."

Hence Jesus, having passed the third and last test, "would give first place to the Word of God; secondly, he would understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world," whose legion competing injustices sow chaos (p. 120).

Chaos is accordingly a stand-in for the devil's own confusion as the enemy of not only order but final divine justice. We in our human weakness live in a world that turns whirligig too easily, yet in which a not-quite-yet rule of divine, uniting justice is always "at hand." It behooves us, King writes, to experience the two baptisms Jesus experienced: the first of water and Word, and the second of fire and Spirit.

It admittedly seems a tall order, in a cynical and chaotic world. Yet faith tells us that justice will prevail.

Justice Theology III

In Justice Theology and Justice Theology II I have tried to name justice as the main concern of the Bible. In both cases I feel I have failed to adequately convey what I mean by justice and why I think it's topic number one in holy writ. I have just come across a short story in The New Yorker that I think makes the point perfectly, if elliptically. It is "The Bible," by Marguerite Duras, translated from French by Deborah Treisman.

The story tells of a young man and woman, without names, who meet casually in Paris and proceed to have a passionless affair. Except when they go to bed together, they talk only of "Islam and the Bible." Or, rather, he talks; she, mostly bored, listens. Though he doesn't believe in God (neither does she) he has a lifelong obsession with scripture — Jewish, Christian, Muslim. He is buying a 16th-century Hebrew Bible on layaway! That is his only dream.

The story's last paragraph packs a wallop:

He bought her a pair of stockings; he was a kind man. But since they’d begun sleeping together, she had no joy in her life. One night, she understood why. I am not made for him, she told herself. All her strength, her youthful joie de vivre seemed to shrivel in his presence; she couldn’t help it. Still, she was flattered. In a sense, she was lucky; she told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them. But she did try to please him; in the evening she read the Gospels, as he had asked her to. What Christ said to his mother made her want to cry. That he had been crucified so young, before his mother’s eyes, was even more revolting. But—it wasn’t her fault—she couldn’t go beyond a certain level of emotion. She did not think that he was God, this man. She thought that he was a man who’d had very noble plans; his death gave him back his humanity, which meant that she was unable to read his story without thinking of that of her own father, who had died the year before, crushed by an industrial wagon, one year before his retirement. He’d been the victim of an injustice that had begun long ago. That injustice had never ceased to exist on earth—it continued through the generations of man.

At the risk of ruining its literary delicacy, I take the passage to suggest that the nameless heroine, like so many of us, can make no strong connection between the religion of the Bible and her sense of "an injustice that had begun long ago," that "had never ceased to exist on earth," and that had "continued through the generations of man." Even the injustice committed at Calgary bears, for her, faint resemblance to her own immediate experience of her father's untimely and excruciating death.

It seems to me that the Bible is the story of our humanity: of that unceasing, pervasive injustice, and its eventual remedy.

It seems to me that there is no book that takes the injustice of the world more seriously than the Bible does.

And it seems to me that we have grown tone deaf to the story, as has Duras' heroine ... and her Bible-besotted hero, as well. He can quote Ecclesiastes from memory, yet it is but a vanity to him, a feat. In all his fetishistic obsession with the Koran and the Old and New Testaments there is no comprehension. There is no passion. There is no humanity.

Justice Theology II

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Justice Theology I started (actually, continued) weaving ideas I got from Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris) into a semblance of a Christian theology based on the idea that the key to understanding the Bible is its concern with justice.

By justice I mean ... what? Intuitively, I'd say, justice is whatever is "meant to be" by God. The world, to the extent that it is not what God had in mind for it, is unjust.

That's a pretty big extent. Injustice, as I think of it, either is co-extensive with evil, or it subsumes it. We hear an awful lot about sin and evil from the pulpit, or at least we used to before religion began downplaying these harsh ideas to keep people in the pews. Nowadays, we have to read theology books to hear much about Christianity's take on evil.

Yet as soon as you start reading up on the "problem of evil" in a theology book, you immediately run into a hitch. Evil is always discussed as a concept within a particular systematic approach to theology. If you read a theology book based on a different systematic approach, you get a different take on evil.

But the people who first spoke the words of the Hebrew Bible, even before they were written down — and the auditors who first listened to them — didn't have a systematic theology. They had an experience of injustice, having been held captive in Egypt, and later in Babylon. The destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem at the hands of pagan foreigners smacked of the possibility that the Jews' just God had punished or deserted them. How to keep their unique faith intact and hold themselves together as a people was more than an intellectual question for them. Their concern for justice was their very identity.


King's book tells us, in speaking about John the Baptist, that

His message concerned justice, and like any good ethician, he spelled it out in detail: "He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none"; tax collectors were told to "collect no more than is appointed," and soldiers were to "rob no one by violence" (Lk 3:11). John was preaching social justice as the [Old Testament] prophets had before him. ... His baptism of "righteousness" called for confession of sins, a washing in the Jordan, and a moral reform. ... [One must begin] the transformation with a moral reform: one committed oneself to the careful observance of a law. Only after the moral reform did one go to the second baptism, a Baptism of Fire and Spirit. John did not administer the second baptism, but he promised another who would (p. 116).

The second baptism would be administered by Jesus, whom John did not yet know when he said, "I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" (Mt 3:11).

Jesus submitted himself to John's baptism first, before embarking on his own mission. He did this "to fulfill all righteousness." A prophesy of Isaiah thus came true: "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles" (Mt 12:18).

As King points out, Jesus' baptismal commitment to harness his personal future to the preordination of a religious text was quickly put to the test by Satan, who tempted Jesus three times during his forty-day sojourn in the desert. Thus did Jesus prove he would hold fast, and would "give first place to the Word of God" in all its justice and righteousness. From that point on, though, he would also "understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything)" (p. 120).

Accordingly Jesus, in identifying fully with human weakness, went beyond justice without undermining justice in the slightest. How it is even possible for anyone to do that — especially one like Jesus, who was divine — is a riddle, a conundrum, and a paradox.

King likens Jesus' temptation by the devil to the dark night of the soul spoken of by later Christian mystics. After an enchantment by the word of God or any other ethical text, the believer inevitably founders on the shoals of an eventual disillusionment. Ultimately the "difficulties in identifying with a text" come to the fore. Good! As long as the believer does not renounce the Word, the Second Baptism — of fire and Spirit — ensues. Only then does one's true spiritual life really begin.

Parallels with koans used to provoke Zen enlightenment are manifest. The Zen postulant is given by his master a riddle, perhaps "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" This is the koan he must decipher. But it is undecipherable by any normal sort of logic. Good! Only once that is come to grips with is spiritual transformation possible.

But the Zen seeker doesn't just knock on the door of a monastery and get handed a koan right away. He is subjected first to the severest form of discipline, for a very long time, in a sort of religious boot camp. He has to measure up to the highest standard: a stern ethic of right behavior. Only after the Zen master senses the postulant is total in his devotion to the ethic of servitude does the master begin to treat the seeker with any sort of decency.

Likewise, King says, the baptism into righteousness offered by John the Baptist came along with the insistence on an ethical standard of behavior, a submission of the ego and the will to exacting norms. Still and all, "John and his baptism were not final; they were the first and lesser part of a double process" (p. 116). The second and greater part involved a riddle, a Jewish koan if you will. How could a God of pure righteousness and perfect justice identify himself with our own human weakness, even unto death on a cross?

Justice Theology

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). In More about Justice I extended my remarks to say that injustice is endemic to our world of experience, both internal or external to the personal soul.

King contrasts the world of sense experience with the Word of God which is spoken to us — and spoken of — in the Bible. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," the gospel of John begins. The point of the gospel is that Jesus Christ is that pre-existent Word.

Words, whether scriptural or not, can enchant us. Stories take us to "another world." In such a story world, justice can win out in the end. Peace and harmony can prevail at last. Order can expunge chaos. What is "meant to be" will actually come to pass in a "new world order."

That is the Bible story in a nutshell. The Bible starts out — after the poetry of God's creation of the universe in Genesis, chapter 1 — in an Eden of peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice. When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, it is as if a primordial symmetry has been broken. Dynamic change has become possible. The bad news is that dynamic change potentiates conflict, disharmony, chaos, and injustice. The good news (gospel means "good news") is that God, at great personal cost, restores peace, harmony, order, and perfect justice at the "end of days."

Symbolically, perfect justice comes when Christ as the "bridegroom" weds his "bride" — us! We are God's partners in bringing justice to the world!


How are we to understand such things as the "fall," the "redemption," the "end times," and the "kingdom that is to come"? If we take these phrases literally, we may look for an actual, tangible, physical "end of the world" ... and quite soon, since the Bible always talks of God's kingdom as imminently arriving. I don't take them literally. Like King, I take them far too seriously to restrict them to their literal meanings. Instead, I take the Bible's "narrative arc" as a template that can be applied again and again to everyday experience.

I am just beginning to apply it in what is for me a new way. I call it "justice theology."

Justice theology sees injustice as the overriding issue of human experience. By injustice, I mean anything other than what is meant to be by God. It can be social or economic injustice, but it can just as well be interpersonal or even sexual injustice.

It can even be intrapersonal injustice. If I don't deal justly with myself — if, for example, I try to be more of an ultra-pure Pharisee than the admittedly flawed Christian that I really am — then a grievous wrong has been done in the world.

Justice theology, accordingly, doesn't believe in whitewashing the world, any more than it believes in whitewashing the soul. It sees injustice as an unavoidable concomitant of the capacity of the world for evolution and change. The idea is to right wrongs wherever they pop up — not to expect to keep them from popping up in the first place.


You can't right wrongs unless you have an ethical standard, and you can't have an ethical standard if you, in King's phrase, "go native" and elevate "the deed" (i.e., whatever happens) over "the word" (the source of the ethical standard: God). Still, you can be enchanted by the phantasmagoria of events, too.

A phantasmagoria of events is a chaos: ever new, ever fresh, ever purposeless. The Word of God never changes. Ethical standards are, at root, absolute, as are divine purposes. These bespeak immutable order, but we, in our lives, live in territory between order and chaos: the edge of chaos.

This is indeed what science shows today. There are dynamical systems that embody order, pure and simple. There are chaotic systems, like the weather. And then there are systems which, like life on earth, are located between order and chaos. These last systems are the only ones that evolve gracefully. Pure order produces nothing new. Pure chaos cannot sustain that which is produced. Only at the edge of chaos can novelty both appear and be sustained.

Justice theology recognizes that systems at the edge of chaos are continually subject to perturbations and hiccups that push them into chaos proper. That's unjust ... but justice can be restored when the system recovers its poise at the edge of chaos. Result: positive evolutionary change.

Justice on earth is dynamic, because events on the evolving earth are dynamic. We are called by Jesus to be "salt of the earth." Salt ... as in the substance used for preserving meat in Jesus's time. By seeking justice in all of its guises and ramifications, we help bring our world out of chaos, time after time after time.

More about Justice

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In Poetic Justice I took up the subject of justice as the root question of all Western religion, taking up themes broached by Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). From the Old Testament prophets to Jesus, from the letters of St. Paul to Revelation, the message is always that a godly kingdom of heaven, divine and just, is near at hand. The obdurate injustice of our world, of our everyday human experience, will give way to the order, harmony, and peace of a new world ruled by the Word of God.

It is hard for me to speak about this crucial biblical idea — the idea that God's justice wins! — without seeming to say that I have an inerrant sense of what is or is not just in God's eyes. I really don't. All I'm truly saying is that Jesus told the Pharisees, and others who challenged him, about real justice, which was not at all the kind of divine favoritism the Pharisees presumed their holy scriptures promised to them especially.

The Pharisees — and I fear I am pretty much a latter-day Pharisee myself, deep down — sought to export from their closed circle whatever woes living in an unjust world might otherwise bring them. They did this by vilifying and excluding those "unclean" Jews who were poor, ill-educated, crippled, leprous, or otherwise existing outside the Lord's obvious ambit of favor. Along came Jesus and reproached them, the Pharisees, for attempting in that way to immunize themselves against all worldly grievance.

Remember: among Jews at the time the idea of an afterlife was not particularly prominent. If one was not right with God, presumably one knew it by how blessed one was in this life. But God's blessing was not upon the individual so much as upon the nation. Ergo, the Pharisees said, our best bet for a happy life as a people is to cast out from among us whomever seems most infected with God's displeasure.

"Wrong," Jesus preached. "Injustice is part and parcel of the present world. You cannot, in a futile attempt to secure God's favor, export it from your midst by means of excluding the poor and all others whom you don't particularly like from your pristine circle. In fact, that just perpetuates worldly injustice and blocks God's kingdom."

At least for latter-day Pharisees like me, that preaching of Jesus goes against reflex. I admit it ... when I see someone who is sick or deformed or filthy, my first reflex is to get as far away as I can from ... yes, from such signs of injustice. What is less just than being born missing an eye or a limb? What is more foul than being unwashed and having no home to wash in?


It is not hard for me — now, after no small amount of reading and reflection — to see how wrong, how un-Christian, that attitude is ... and how difficult it is to eradicate from my soul.

It begins to look to me as if Jesus knew exactly how difficult it is when he said it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter heaven. By rich, he meant those not poor, not visibly unclean, not seemingly out of favor with the Lord. Injustice pervades the inner world just as it does the outer world. Injustice is endemic to our world of experience, whether internal or external to the soul.

If that weren't so, the Bible would make no sense. Everything in the Bible revolves around the notions of justice and injustice. Why is the world so full of injustice and woe? Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden. What can be done about it? Get right with God. How? Follow the commandments. How best to do that? Love God and treat all his people as any "neighbor" ought to be treated. How? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which means what, exactly? Treat them with justice.


In short, make the kingdom of heaven real, make it come to earth. The Jews speak of this by the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam: "repairing the world." Christians call it "good works." But it's not just about doing good external deeds — it's a spiritual healing of one's inner world as well. As King shows in Enchantments, it requires (metphorically speaking) two baptisms, the first of water and the second of fire and spirit. The first baptism — not the physical act but the inward mark it bestows — gives us our chance at faith, our capacity to become enraptured by the Word of God. The second baptism allows us to re-enter earthly experience, not blinded by the divine light, but changed and charged for the task of reparing the world.

Poetic Justice

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) touches (p. 112) on what I think may be the root question of all Western religion, why do bad things happen to good people?

We, each one of us, have a built-in sense of rightness, of justice. The evidence of this is that we are all capable of being enchanted by stories whose outcomes are somehow "meant to be":

... the verbal world (especially the world of fiction) is ruled by a "poetic justice" (justice underlies most novels and has a strong rhetorical appeal). A verbal world is a world of form wherein all is regulated by Principle. Accordingly, in a novel, hidden goodness and hidden wickedness eventually become manifest and everyone is suitably rewarded (p. 110).

We have an instinct for a just outcome in a perfect world. Outcomes in this, our world, however, so often fail to satisfy it. Bad things happen. Worse, they happen to good people, for no defensible reason. Not everyone is suitably rewarded. Possibly no one gets perfect justice.


As a Christian who most of the time doesn't really "get" his religion all that well, I find I am prone to making a very bad mistake. It is possible to react to "not being suitably rewarded" by assuming as I do, quite erroneously, that one is in fact being fairly treated in life. If one does not feel all that happy with one's lot, he then may (consciously or unconsciously) imagine he has not been "good" enough to deserve better. The remedy would seem to be to live a "holier," more sin-free life.

But reforming one's life can be taken only so far. After enough of that, one becomes not a good Christian but a latter-day Pharisee, "a whitewashed tomb full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." Clamping down too hard on the "bad" impulses we all carry around inside us is not what Jesus wants of us.

But why not? Ultimately, the answer seems to be that we and the world we live in are so constituted that we and it cannot be perfectly just, perfectly righteous, perfectly good. As I said in an earlier post, The Problem of the Two Souls, we are all like Faust, with "two souls" dwelling in our bosom. Only the first embodies our sense of perfect justice. The second wants ever fresher and more intense worldly experience, at the expense of any guiding ethic or moral purpose.

King calls it an ongoing conflict between Word and World. The divine Word tells us of a perfect World, not yet ours. But these two worlds, the perfect one and the real one we see and experience, coexist; both are real:

The prophetic wrtings [in the Old Testament] regularly affirm that the two worlds (Word and experience) are not ultimately separate: the God of whom they spoke practices "justice and righteousness in the earth" (Jer 9:24). In making this claim, the prophets had to face the immense difficulty that confronts every theologian: why do bad things happen to good people? If God rules the world in justice, why is injustice so evident? (p. 112)

Sometimes the Hebrew prophets promised retribution soon to come, yet:

... the good continued to suffer and the retribution did not always occur. The World seemed victorious over the Word ... The evident power of the wicked had overcome the sense of justice. But [still the prophets insisted] the Lord would come soon ...

"The great day of the Lord is near and hastening fast," wrote the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah (1:14). In the New Testament, Jesus in the Gospels spoke also of the imminent coming of the kingdom of heaven to earth, saying "not a stone would be left upon a stone (see p. 113). Saint Paul advised in 1st Corinthians 7:31 that "the form of this world is passing away." And the author of the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, sees "a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away" (21:1).

Whatever this kind of talk may mean — King takes it seriously, but not literally — it clearly has to do with the idea that the words of power that God poured into the prophets will ultimately come true: poetic justice will somehow prevail in the end, here for us on earth.


We all are capable of being put under a verbal spell by a prophet or preacher, today as in earlier ages, and of resonating with such a message. This is King's main point. The enchantment itself is the best "evidence" of the prophetic message coming true:

But what evidence did the prophets present? The enchantment itself. That is, the message of the prophet — the visible world will pass and be replaced by another — tells of the auditors' experience as the prophet speaks. As the people listen, the visible world fades and a new world, a new heaven and a new earth, rise from the scroll of the prophet. The Word replaces earth and sky, for these "roll up like a scroll" and, as long as the spell remains, they are not even remembered (p. 113).

When the spell is later broken — as it is bound to be — how do we react? This, says King, is the principal question of all spiritualty. Do we continue to grant any primacy whatever to the spellbinding Word?

If not, injustice wins. At the end of the day, this is why I insist Judeo-Christian religion has not yet, and never will, grow obsolete.

The Problem of the Two Souls

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

By now it's no secret that I consider Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) essential reading for Christians. Saying why I think so is unfortunately not easy.

One reason is that the book talks of a duality within the breast of each of us that can turn our religious commitment to God's word into a spiritus vertiginis — a spirit of confusion. This comes out most clearly in King's discussion of Faust, Goethe's poetic masterpiece of the early 19th century.

The main character of this 12,111-line dramatic poem has elsewhere been called Dr. Faustus. He was a scholar and professor enchanted by words and books. One day he suddenly realized his books were unable to slake his thirst for pure experience in the world. He abruptly turned for once to the Erdgeist, the Earth Spirit, for guidance.

This was exactly what Mephisto — Mephistopheles — wanted. Mephisto was the adversary to God sometimes known as Satan. But, as in the Book of Job, Satan began the story of Faust in attendance at the heavenly court, of a mind to arrange with the Lord to put Faust to a test. Though the Lord promised Mephistopheles he, God, would ultimately lead Faust "to the light" (p. 88), Mephistopheles would be given, in the meantime, a free hand to corrupt Faust's erstwhile devotion to godly things.

Faust would accordingly succumb to Mephisto's urging for him to sign a contract: if Mephisto could arrange for Faust to experience such bliss on earth that he "was satisfied with the present moment and asked it to linger" (p. 91), Mephisto would gain Faust's soul for all eternity.

But Faust had an ace in the hole: he was aware that his own inner life was based on a duality. He told his book-besotted assistant, Wagner,"You know only a single impulse ... Two souls dwell in my bosom" (p. 90). One of Faust's "souls" was that of the literary lover of texts. Such a lover is subject to the enchantments of worlds made entirely of words.

Faust's other "soul" resonated with the Erdgeist. It wanted nothing more than the perfection of Faust's experience in this world.


King makes clear that books — words, texts, verbal enchantments — are, for us all, psychological stand-ins for the Divine Word by which God created the world, according to the Old and New Testaments. In the way in which books are capable of enchanting us and transporting us out of this too often unintelligible world here below, they are associated in our psyches with God, heaven, eternity, justice, harmony, and order. As such, they embody the perfect forms which Socrates spoke of in the Dialogues of Plato.

But as Christians like St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton have found, pure contemplation of what we imbibe from words and books, the Bible included, is bound to run aground on the shoals of our second "soul," the one which, like Faust's, is oriented toward earthly experience, not heavenly delight. Hence after declaring that the deed, not the word, was everything, Faust willingly underwent the "phantasmagoria" that Mephisto arranged for him: a chaos of experience that led to tragic consequences for those Faust most loved: his virginal lady love Marguerite and others.

Marguerite's mother and brother died due to Faust's diabolical machinations. Marguerite herself drowned the illegitimate child Faust fathered in her and died on the gallows for her crime. But, just as had been promised by the Lord, Faust himself would be saved from eternal damnation!

How can this be, this inversion of what we would normally expect divine justice to mete out? Thomas King's explanation of the conundrum is that God knew Faust would never fully succumb to Mephisto's World-over-the-Word philosophy. Why wouldn't he? Simply because Faust's first "soul" — his enchantment with stories of higher things — would ensure that he would remain restlessly unsatisfied by the chaos of earthly experience, with no guiding ethic or purpose in sight.


We all have two souls, no? We all undergo an inner dialogue, a tension between the desire to know a perfect, static order, God-given and eternal, and the desire to allow a chaotic unpredictability to make our experience of this world ever fresh, ever new. God, make me your perfect servant every day, in every way — but not yet, dear God, not yet!

Carl Sagan on Natural Theology (II)

Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Now, more on the late astronomer extraordinaire Carl Sagan's posthumous The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God: the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology Sagan delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1985, now in book form. In these lectures, Sagan took on natural theology, religion's claim that scientific studies of nature bolster belief in God.

Sagan, who died far too young in 1996, is remembered for his pioneering work in exploring (robotically) other worlds in our solar system. He created the popular TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and was instrumental in establishing the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, SETI. He championed nuclear disarmament and warned of possible nuclear winter. And he opposed religious fundamentalists who resist Darwinism and other fruits of modern scientific inquiry.

In a number of previous posts to this blog I extolled Sagan as possessing as fine a spirituality as anyone could hope for. But he was clearly allergic to religion, as distinct from spirituality. The Varieties of Scientific Experience is in large part a compendium of reasons why he spurned religion.

I touched on one of them in Sagan on Natural Theology (I). There are a number of traditional "proofs" of God's existence that philosophers and theologians have proposed down through the centuries. Sagan says none of them satisfy a true skeptic. In fact, skepticism was precisely what Caarl Sagan believed most "religiously" in: the suspended judgment, systematic doubt, and the unbridled criticism characteristic of modern science.

In this book, Sagan questions (among other "proofs") the cosmological one: the assertion that an infinite backward regress of causes is absurd, so there has to be an uncaused cause, God. Why not, he says, then ask "What caused God?"

As I said in the earlier post, it now appears that scientifically investigatable causes cannot be tracked back any further than the big bang. But why stop there, intellectually? Why not ask "What caused the big bang?" and answer "God"? In other words, why terminate the causal regress at a point of utter incomprehensibility, rather than with an intentional agent?


One of Sagan's reasons for preferring incomprehensibility to intentionality is that he habitually tried to disentangle answers to important questions, such as does God exist, from our natural human tendency to project our fondest wishes onto the universe. We hope there's a God, Sagan said, so we should resist the conclusion that God exists. "We should ... pay attention to how badly we want to believe a given contention. The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be" (p. 230).

In offering such guidance, materialists like Sagan assume that "There is a God" is the type of assertion that evidence can establish or refute. Then they show how weak the physical evidence is, taken all by itself.

But religious faith is the hope of things unseen. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," Hebrews 11:1 reads. Faith starts by assuming that certain propositions cannot be proven by evidence alone. That's why we look to revelation. God is told of, so believers hold, first and foremost in scripture. Only after we accept scripture can we resort to natural theology to see what extra evidence of God's providence we can find, what greater clarity scientific inquiry can offer us.


The science Carl Sagan loved proves the Bible cannot always be read literally. The creation stories in Genesis and the counting up of generations which seems to show the earth is but a few thousand years old mean something other than what a literalist would assume. Our human forefathers alone go back over 2 million years. The planet we live on is 4.5 billion years old. The universe began 14 billion years ago.

Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature

One of the greatest arguments within modern Christianity is about the "literal inerrancy" of the Bible. The literary critic Northrop Frye, a non-fundamentalist Christian who was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada, wrote two books towards the end of his life which claimed that the "literal" meaning of much of the Bible is much closer to the poet's than to the fact-based historian's or to the descriptive journalist's. In The Great Code Frye wrote, "In the Bible the literal meaning is the poetic meaning ... in a quite specific sense of confronting us with explicitly metaphorical and other forms of distinctively poetic utterance" (p. 62).

Northrop Frye's Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature

In Words with Power Frye said the Bible's "literal meaning is its mythical and metaphorical meaning" (p. 102). The earliest authors of the Old Testament were, during the Jews' Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century B.C., writing down and weaving together stories from a longstanding oral tradition that was in danger of dying. Words at that time had always been used in powerful ways to evoke an unseeable God. It would have been unthinkable to insist on what we today call "literal" inerrancy. That type of language expectation wouldn't come to the fore until modern times, in the last four centuries or so.

As the Wikipedia article on Frye puts it:

... it was in reflecting on the similarity between [the poets William] Blake and [John] Milton that Frye first stumbled upon the “principle of the mythological framework,” the recognition that “the Bible was a mythological framework, cosmos or body of stories, and that societies live within a mythology” [quote from Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye and the Theoretical Imagination]. Blake thus led Frye to the conviction that the Bible provided Western societies with the mythology which informed all of Western literature.

Northrop Frye thus found the spirit of the Bible in its poetic, mythic power. Many Christians dispute this. The ones who do not typically have little trouble reconciling faith with modern science. The ones who do gave Carl Sagan dyspepsia. In reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience, one wonders whether Sagan would have had much to say if fundamentalists weren't talking so loud.

Carl Sagan on Natural Theology (I)

Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience

Carl Sagan, the late astronomer extraordinaire, has a new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. Ann Druyan, his widow, has edited into book form the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology Sagan delivered at Scotland's University of Glasgow, on the occasion of the lectureship's centennial in 1985. In these lectures, Sagan highlights Western religious orthodoxy's incompatibility with modern scientific understandings, suggesting that the former will give way to the latter, just as it has in the past.

But to me there seems to be a great big hole in his argument.

In his chapter on "The God Hypothesis," Sagan assails the various proofs of God's existence that have been offered in the history of religion in the East and in the West. One is the cosmological argument. All things are caused by something else, yet an infinite regress of causes of causes of causes is, presumably, impossible. There must be a first, or uncaused, cause: God.

Sagan doesn't accept that. "And who made God?" he asks.

Then he turns to the big bang, the explosion of our cosmos 15 billion years ago out of a tiny primordial dot of super-dense stuff. To the question of what preceded the big bang, he says there are two available answers:

One is "Don't ask that question," which is very close to saying that God did it. And the other is that we live in an oscillating universe in which there are an infinite number of expansions and contractions (pp. 155-156).

Sagan clearly favors the latter hypothesis, since it obviates the need to ascribe the universe's origin to anyone or anything. But his editor footnotes the passage with:

In 1998 two international teams of astronomers independently reported unexpected evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These findings suggest the universe is not oscillating but will continue to expand forever.

Which implies that the big bang, the origin of the universe, was unique. It will not be repeated, much less repeated ad infinitum.

It appears that the entire gamut of laws of nature which science studies began with the big bang, such that we lack all scientific purchase on what may have happened prior to it. The big bang is, as best we can tell, a scientifically impenetrable "singularity" at the origin of time, space, matter, and energy. Assuming that it had a cause, there is no way for science to figure it out.

If the backward chain of natural causes simply terminates when we reach the big bang, why? If that first, uncaused cause is meaningless to the point of total incomprehensibility, why?

A nice alternative — if we are not in an infinite loop of eternal cosmic oscillations — is to assume the big bang itself was caused by a meaningful, intentional, comprehensible agent, itself primary and uncaused.

Why is that so hard to believe?

Isn't it now more likely than it seemed in 1985 that science and religion can come to sing from the same hymn book?

Isn't the uniqueness of the big bang very strong natural-theological evidence that there is, after all, a God?

Paths to Spirit

It seems to me that the fundamental basis of Western religion might be boiled down to this: what is meant to be is destiny. It will happen, somehow, thanks be to God.

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) talks of how we can be "enchanted" by stories. In stories there is a sense of intrinsic inevitability, of destiny. The outcomes of the stories we love best are simply meant to be.

King contrasts story outcomes with events in the real world, many of which are clearly not meant to be. The world is accordingly less intelligible than a book. A lot of the time, what happens is not what is really meant to occur.

Deep down, we would all like to live in a world in which what is is always what is meant to be, and what happens is always what is meant to transpire. Religion tells us of just such a higher world, up above ours. King puts it this way (p. vi):

Santayana has said, "Another world to live in — whether we expect to ever pass wholly over into it or not — is what we mean by having a religion."

We have a sense of the discrepancy between what actually happens in our world and what is truly meant to be. It is by means of this inbuilt sense that we simply know when a storybook narrative hits the nail squarely on the head ... and when it doesn't.


One of my favorite stories is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Hifalutin' critics sniff at it, yet it has entranced millions over the decades since it was published, spawning a triptych of marvelous movies in recent years. Why? Because it tells of the victory of what is meant to be over that which currently is.

What is meant to be is the peace of the Shire, the dwelling-place of hobbits Bilbo Baggins, Frodo, Samwise Gamgee, Merry and Pippin, et al. Indeed, what is meant to be is the harmony of all Middle Earth. What is actually happening in Middle-earth, however, is that a force of evil, represented by the power-mad Sauron, is seeking to control everything, by regaining The One Ring. Sauron's lust for power ruins the peace. All struggles for power are inimical to peace. So the plot of the tale concerns the need to destroy the Ring once and for all, lest it turn its bearer as contentious and power-mad as Sauron.

Evil, by this broad definition, is that which stands in the way of what is meant to be. If what is meant to be is universal harmony and peace, then struggles for absolute power destroy peace and constitute evil. That is the moral logic of The Lord of the Rings.


Is there a heavenly book, a story written by a divine author that inevitably shapes events on earth? Are there things that are simply meant to be? Is there an eternal being whose very words make things so?

Yes and no. What is meant to be — the peace and harmony of the Shire and all Middle-earth, metaphorically — is possible only if there is a King, with us his willing subjects. Then and only then do actual destiny and what is meant to be coincide.

King Aragorn, whose return the destruction of The One Ring enables, is like King Arthur or any other good king. The primary function of a monarch is not so much to rule as to unite. To turn a multiplicity into a unity is what distinguished England's Queen Elizabeth I, whatever her double dealings with rival France or duplicities with Mary Queen of Scots. Our first president, though he eschewed a crown, knew this. How many of us can name a single ideological position or policy initiative of George Washington's? How many think he wasn't, with Lincoln, one of our two greatest presidents?

Making a unity of an internal multiplicity is, for Thomas King, the distinguishing mark of a spirituality, any spirituality. "In this study," he writes (p. 59), "spirituality has been identified as any method that deals with the impulses and moods that act apart from the will." Our impulses, moods, humors, and appetites are the "spirits" that dwell within us. If such psychic forces control us, independent of the will, then the kingly, uniting self can effectively disappear — just as Frodo vanished whenever he put on the Ring. Sauron (or the Devil) can then run rampant.


Religion is a gateway to spirituality. The Christian religion speaks of Christ the King. Christians are told to submit their inner multiplicities of impulse and appetite to taking up and bearing their cross on a daily basis. King describes the earnest attempts of great Christians such as St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton to do just this — to become knights-errant of the cross, as it were.

Their noble attempts to escape the World of Sense Experience and live by Word Alone ultimately broke down in failure, though. A bad thing? Not really. In each case, a Dark Night of the Soul betokened the birth of a true spirituality:

Now the knight must create his or her own judgments and a new way of life. Inner spirits (moods and impulses) can no longer simply surrender to words; now the process is reversed: words — if words are involved at all — must arise from the spirits. That is, the impulses and moods must now create a truth, a personal truth. As one proceeds with this awesome task of creating a truth, one gives birth to a new and indescribable self, a self that is not patterned after examples found in a book. It is a self so awesome and personal that it arises on the border between freedom and madness. In the world of time one is confronting an eternal presence, and, though one speaks only to a human friend, one knows one is speaking to the eternal God. One speaks to God as to a friend and to a frriend as God — and one is amazed aat both the Presence one addresses and the self that speaks. (p. 63)

Before Aragorn took up his mantle as king, he was a wandering knight: a Ranger named Strider. He operated under the blessing of otherworldly Elven Folk. He lived by Word Alone. Knights seek justice, but only kings can unify.

In a way, The Lord of the Rings can be read as Aragorn's Night of the Soul, in the course of which he regained the ability to make decisions on his own. The reforging of the shattered ancient sword of kings, Narsil, as Aragorn's sword Andúril symbolized his newfound — rediscovered — sense of personhood, integrity, and authenticity. Then he was ready to tread the Paths of the Dead without fear, and eventually to become King of Gondor.

In so doing, Aragorn found his destiny and made real what was meant to be. Like Ignatius after his own personal or spiritual rebirth, Aragorn "gave primacy to a sort of sure intuition whereby 'the devout soul, without questioning and without desire to question, follows what has been manifested to it' ... a personal and wordless manifestation of God that cannot be generalized" (p. 63).

Aragorn, like other knights-errant, came to "a moment wherein they find a depth in themselves that is so unique that all the guiding principles they have received no longer apply" (p. 64). Aragorn could no longer accept what the Elf-Lord's prophesies held in store for him. They were but words, and now words alone could not decide. Spirit ruled Middle-earth.