Irony and Experience in Today's World

Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity

Religion scholar Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition is a 2005 book that stands in eloquent riposte to a number of books that have been published recently maligning Christianity and religion in general. Among these is Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I discussed at length in my Science of Religion? series. Another is The End of Faith, Sam Harris' recent book proposing an end to religious faith as an antidote to religious hatreds, which I talked about in my The End of Faith? series.

To Smith, the Great Tradition that was the Christian Church of the first millennium and that thunders down through history to reach us (in diluted form) today is the answer to all such atheists who take a principled stand against religion in general, and who oppose Christian religion in particular.


There are many reasons why today's church pales beside the church of the past. We are the heirs of "new" outlooks that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

• the advent of the controlled experiment, the rise of science, and the adoption of a "scientistic" worldview
  
• the burgeoning of secularism in governance and religious indifference in the ordering of human affairs
• the dominance of technology, innovation, and the "myth of progress"
• the replacement in our philosophical inquiries of the understanding that truth is objective with the insistence on purely subjective standards of truth
• individualism run rampant, aided by the idea that each person can, and ought to, read Holy Scripture without mediation through church teaching
  
• the "cult of narcissism"; the belief that "our wills are sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and the highest endowment we have" (pp. xxiii-xxiv)
  

Coming about as a reaction to all those features of modernity has been religious fundamentalism, Christian and otherwise. Smith takes Christian conservatives to task for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In their insistence on reading the Bible literally, they miss much of its grandeur and, even worse, its meaning.

In their signature intolerance of the viewpoints of others, they also offer atheists like Dennett and Harris a takeoff point for junking all religion.

Smith offers a mild and moderate — yet ultimately radical — return to the understandings that informed the Christian life for a millennium or more after Christ was born, as a valid third way between atheism and fundamentalism ... while avoiding the mistake that has so long been made by modern religious liberals: taking a transcendent, supernatural God out of the picture and replacing him with a touchy-feely sentimentality and endless "rallying cries to be good" (p. xx).


While all the above is true, and most welcome, my one quibble with it is that it is preaching to the choir. Since I am a member of the choir, it is dulcet music to my ears. But I recognize that it will not be music to the ears of Mr. Dennett, Mr. Harris, Mr. Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Richard Dawkins, etc., etc., etc. (See In Search of Comity.)

Nor will it soothe the savage breast of the many vocal fundamentalists who spout in evangelical circles today.

Even worse, it is unlikely to persuade the many basically apathetic young people of today, irreligious but not formally atheistic. I'll call them the "lost sheep" who have simply given up on the search for God as source and guarantor of life's meaning. That is, they have "given up" to the extent that they ever considered committing to such a search in the first place.

There are several reasons why so many young people now have a tin ear when it comes to religion. For some, the very dogmatism of the conservatives is a red flag, a turnoff. For others, the problem is simply that their parents didn't even begin to communicate the "good side" of religion to them.

But let me tell you what I think the most basic problem is. It has to do with the point I made earlier about the "cult of narcissism": each of the "lost sheep" experiences his or her will as sovereign; as "unpremised" (meaning that what it wants doesn't have to square with what anyone thinks it ought to want); and as spontaneously, radically free.


I'd like to focus on the most important word in that tangled mass of verbiage: experience.

What we do depends on what we believe, and what we believe depends on what we experience. Smith himself makes much of this fact in his discussion of the early church:

Religion begins with experience — ritual, belief, and experience, and (to echo the cadence of St. Paul's aphorism ["Now abideth faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love"]) the greatest of these is experience. The experience of things that inspire us gives rise to symbols as the mind tries to think about these invisible, inspiring things. ... eventually the mind introduces thoughts to resolve the ambiguities of symbols and to systematize intuitions ... (p. 97)

And that is where theology — "the mind of the church," initially absent in the original Christians' experience — came from. Theology formalized "faith's focal attention ... on a vision of reality that sets morality in motion, as a byproduct almost." Thus did Christianity come to "include the summons to the upright life" (p. 96).

Yet, however valid the summons, we are already several links in the chain down from the first disciples' pristine, original "experience of living in the presence of someone [Jesus] whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way [they] found divinely mysterious" (p. 96).

Some fifteen to twenty centuries after Christian theology and morality began to be codified, today's "lost sheep" see the church as simply disseminating moral teachings that don't square with their inner situation. In their experience, a sovereign, unpremised, "dark" will is the only thing between them and chaos.


We hear that word, "dark," a lot today. A recent series of "Pearls Before Swine" comic strips by Stephan Pastis, lampooning another well-known strip, "The Family Circus," illustrates what the word means in today's with-it culture (click to enlarge):


"We're so dark and they're so sweet" could stand as Reason Number One why so many young people won't consider joining up with the Christians today. They experience a life in which the only thing that stands between them and the chaos of their "dark" impulses is their idiosyncratic, sovereign will. If they don't do all of the "bad" things defined by Christians as sinful, it's simply because the don't choose to.

That is the ultimate irony of it all. The individual will, decoupled from God's overarching intent for us, can sometimes stand as a buffer against sin. But what it cannot do is open the self-willed up to the "experience of living in the presence of someone whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way [they might otherwise find] divinely mysterious."


The "lost sheep's" much too sophisticated awareness of how their own "dark" impulses can be self-managed — and their own sense of irony about doing it — means that their experience is unlike that of any earlier generation in history. What Huston Smith fails to do, sadly, is take this into account.

Irony is another "in" word these days, as this recent Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau indicates (again, click to enlarge):


We live in an age in which it is not only possible, but necessary for many, to take an ironic stance toward many of the worst evils of our history, not to mention the "dark" impulses within the human soul. As a result, we simply experience the world today in ways that must baffle Huston Smith and stands to impede any well-meaning attempts to turn back the clock to the sensibility of the Great Tradition of the church.

Literal vs. Metaphorical

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

As I finish reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon I find that a prime aspect of religion that he seems blind to is the longstanding dispute between believers who understand their professions of faith in a literal way and those who understand them in a metaphorical, figurative way.

To take a quick example: In the Catholic Church at every Mass we recite the Nicene Creed, which begins, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen ... ." Leaving aside the other clauses, what does "Maker of heaven and earth" mean? Specifically, what does it means to say God "makes" this world, our earth?

If you are one of those who understand this idea literally, you may have a hard time with any explanation of the earth's origins that doesn't square with the most direct possible interpretation of the words in Genesis, chapter 1. Which tends to leave the theory of evolution out in the cold.

If on the other hand you understand this idea of God as the world's maker metaphorically, both Darwin and Genesis could be absolutely right.


In talking about the literal versus the metaphorical, I would like to sidestep any attempt at a rigorous definition of the two terms. I am perfectly willing to substitute terms like "simile" or "analogy" for the noun metaphor, "figurative" or "poetic" for the adjective metaphorical.

In fact, I am willing to stipulate that for me, the name of God is a metonymy — a term-substituting figure of speech, such as a "suit" for a business executive, or the "crown" for the king or queen. In this case, the word "God" stands in for the Great Big Truth we would otherwise have no chance of expressing.

What I am really trying to get at is not what a metaphor or a metonymy is, but rather the way in which the human mind works when it is in "figure-of-speech mode," as contrasted with when it is operating in "literal mode."

Moreover, what I am really trying to say is that some people (among whom I count myself) respond to religious language by automatically adopting a "figure-of-speech stance" towards it, while other people reflexively adopt a "literalist stance." Literalists and figuratives, we might call these two groups.


A figurative religionist such as myself is, I imagine, apt to be more of a "liberal" when it comes to his or her understanding of theology; a literalist will tend to be a religious "conservative." Thus do "liberal" and "literal" effectively become direct antonyms, when the discussion turns to religion.

I'm not just talking about how different people read the Bible, mind you. Bible reading is part of it, but in my Catholic tradition, Bible reading is amplified by how believers interpret all the wide-ranging pronouncements the Church has authored down through history, as summarized in, among other writings, The Catechism of the Catholic Church. How we "hear" the creeds we say in church, along with the homilies, the prayers, and all the other parts of the Order of the Mass, depends crucially on whether we are liberal figuratives or literalist conservatives.


Most of the complaints which Dennett makes about religion seem (at least to this liberal figurative) to convict the literalist conservatives.

It is the literalist conservatives who cannot reconcile Darwin's evolution theory with a belief in God. It is they who mock science's materialistic outlook: nothing not made of matter and its movements and modifications exists. It is they who conflate that philosophical definition of materialism with the everyday one: a bias toward gaining material possessions and away from living a life of the spirit.

Literalist conservatives seem to be increasing their share of Christians in this country, and they are certainly not shy about claiming that liberal figuratives like myself are missing the boat. But I would counter that it is they who have it wrong. Christianity has historically not been literal in its reading of scripture.


Accordingly, I think Dennett himself misses a very big boat by assuming that the "spell" of religion needs "breaking" simply because maximally strident, intransigently radical fundamentalism so menaces the common enterprise of all humanity. Yes, that is a spell that needs breaking, but, no, it is not the same intoxication with the Infinite that typifies Christianity in its "Great Tradition" and informs all the other grand and magnificent World Religions.

Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity

So says religion scholar Huston Smith in The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. Smith's 2005 book stands as the most eloquent possible riposte to Dennett's, though the latter would only be published the following year.

To Smith, the Great Tradition that was the Christian Church of the first millennium is the answer to all those — whether fundamentalist evangelicals or atheists like Dennett — who would polarize the world into two armed camps, one insistent that Holy Writ must be read literally, the other that it should be read as false.

Smith shows (see p. 17) that there are four levels of biblical exegesis that we must never fail to attend to. At the lowest level is the literal. Next up the line is the ethical: what should believers do or not do. Then comes the allegorical — as with ascribing meanings to Jesus's parables.

Most conservative literalists would not blanch at these three, but the fourth would raise many eyebrows. It is what Smith calls anagogic.

One online dictionary defines an anagogy as "a mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven or the afterlife." In Smith's view the word encourages a mythical outlook, à la Joseph Campbell; per Reinhold Niebuhr, "Myth is not history, it is truer than history."

The problem for literalists is that anagogic, mythical, mystical modes of biblical exegesis put slavish literalism on the back burner. These modes recognize, first and foremost, that "languages are geared to the worldviews that monitor them" (p. 20).

Recognizing that fact, we moderns accordingly need to transpose the language of the Bible away from the ancient worldviews that informed it, as it was set down, it is quite true ... but over into a mode of understanding that assiduously factors out "the sea change from the traditional to the scientistic worldview that has profoundly affected the way our language works."

Today's biblical literalists — including those who, like Dennett and other vocal nonbelievers, read scripture literally and then dispute it on that basis — don't do that. They are blind to what I think of as metaphorical ways of interpreting religious truth.

In posts soon to come, I intend to expand on the remarks above as I detail my highly positive reactions to Smith's magnificent defense of Christianity in its Great Tradition.