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