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| Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word |
If the first baptism is the seal of righteousness, the second is the precondition of compassion. It is the guarantor that righteousness does not mean self-righteousness.
The first baptism is that of being spellbound by a verbal enchanter — Jesus was such a one — being taken up out of oneself to an ideal world above this one, a paradisal world of perfect justice in comparison to which our world of impure sense experience can seem utter darkness. We can be so taken by the Word that we seek wholly to abandon the World. This is the Night of the Senses. After it, as various knights-errant, we may devote ourselves to serving our ethical and moral ideals to the exclusion of giving free expression to our own needs and interests.
This typically brings on a Night of the Soul, since such purity of adherence to any impersonal verbal formula or set of commandments is ultimately, we tend to find to our chagrin, beyond our ability. Temptation intervenes in our lives, just as it did for Jesus when he was thrice tempted by the devil in the desert. That is when our baptism of fire can, if we are as steadfast as Jesus was, become a baptism of spirit, a germination of our inborn capacity for humanity an dhumility into the habit of compassion. Compassion, in which we confront the ways in which we are all equally prone to temptation and imperfection, to suffering and weakness, is seemingly the key to the kingdom of heaven on earth.
This is the paradigm of religious experience which King refines from his reading of scripture; from the spiritual biographies of Thomas Merton and Ignatius Loyola; from medieval mystical writings such as The Cloud of Unknowing; as well as from the Dialogues of Plato, Faust, Don Quixote, and a host of other works.
When I peruse King's book, I find it totally convincing. But after putting it down, I find myself asking questions. One of these is that with which I opened above: why is it that so few people think of the Christian faith as one in which the germination of humanity into full-fledged compassion is the crucial point?
We think of righteousness first, and only then (maybe) compassion as the prime directive of Christian living ... right? Righteousness, as in holiness, uprightness, rectitude, or probity; as in virtue, decency, goodness, honesty, integrity. As in being free of sin and going to heaven rather than hell when we die. If we serve God and not Satan, we do so first and foremost by our pious faith, by our turning away from sin, no? That is how we save our souls.
Not only does compassion come in a distant second to moral compunction, some even see religion as the enemy of compassion. In the current issue of TIME magazine, scientist Steven Pinker's article on "The Mystery of Consciousness" betrays such an attitude. Pinker suggests we may never be able to solve the "Hard Problem" about consciousness, no matter how much we learn about the workings of the brain. That problem is the one I talked about in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts (the last of which was "Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans"). To wit, how does our brain give rise to the sheer experience of undergoing its own activity, as we internally monitor its subjective nature? Or, why is it like something to see the color green?
Pinker notes that the religious idea of the soul is akin to this notion that consciousness is an ethereal reality above and beyond the workings of the brain. Lewis Thomas wrote in The Lives of a Cell, according to this article on personal grief in a recent edition of The Baltimore Sun,
... that it would be odd for nature to waste anything as complex as consciousness. "I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for the biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter."
If that's what consciousness is, severable at the filaments of its attachment, then maybe that's also what the soul is. But Pinker nixes that easy identity of soul with consciousness — without going so far as to deny the validity of the Hard Problem, as does philosopher Daniel Dennett, who is a much more impassioned atheist than Pinker is.
Pinker expresses his own distaste for religious belief in his final section, "Toward a New Morality." He finds the scientific impenetrability of consciousness to be an aid to compassion. If each person knows that he or she is conscious as a mysterious property of brain functioning — however unprovable that fact of one's consciousness may be to skeptical others — then every other person with demonstrably similar brain function must be seen also a like vessel of conscious experience, entitled to the same consideration we give to ourselves: "Hath not a Jew — or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog — a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer."
Religion with its concern for the advancement of the individual soul to the afterlife is, to Pinker, the enemy of such a recognition. It can promote cruelty, not compassion: "Just remember the most famous people in recent history who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11."
I'd say that's a caricature — nay, a corruption, a demonic parody — of the idea of religion. Yet it's one to which many religious practitioners are prone, in the name of God or Allah. It's simply incorrect for Pinker to fall into the trap of identifying a thing with its demonic parody. Yet it's understandable that he and others do so. In fact, I'd say it's far more important for someone to find his or her own compassion than to be right about religion.
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