I’d like to say that I find [Georgia] Governor Perdue’s emphasis on prayer to address droughts baffling. But I don’t. I understand it completely. Growing up Southern Baptist, I regularly prayed until about midway through college when I turned into a freedom-hating Bolshevik surrender monkey. But even if I understand where he’s coming from, it’s still strange. Although it’s a seemingly harmless practice, it logically implies the existence of a sadistic, cruel and petty God. Indeed, as people like Hitchens point out with characteristic tact, much of Christian doctrine – I now realize – assumes precisely this sort of God.
There are a couple of aspects to this implied petty cruelty (with respect to prayer). The first is simply that God apparently causes these events (drought, coal mine collapse, sick child, etc.) in the first place. Looking specifically at Georgia, praying for rain obviously assumes that God has some sort of control over the weather. Thus, he either caused the drought, or allowed it to happen. And once caused, the act of prayer assumes that God could step in and end it. —Publius at Obsidian Wings.
From this standpoint, a faith in a personal God belongs to a less
mature standpoint, where one still needs the sense of a personal
relation to things; one is not yet ready to face the ultimate truth. A
line of thinking of the nature, steadily gathering strength, runs
through modern thought and culture, from Spinoza, through Goethe, to
our present time. –Charles Taylor, quoted in my earlier post The Zeitgeist of Unbelief
I’m preparing a longer essay based on further reflections on Taylor’s A Secular Age in which I want to convey the complex of elements that contributed to the shift from the enchanted world taken for granted by premoderns to the disenchanted universe we all live in now. But when I read this post by Publius, it struck me that his reaction to the idea of praying for better weather as implying an assumption (unconscious for those who do it) that God is cruel seems quite reasonable. Why would he allow (or cause?) such terrible things to happen in the first place if, as when praying to him, one assumes he has the power to stop them once they happen?
I don’t want to get into some abstract discussion of theodicy; I’m more interested rather to try to understand this urge to pray for deliverance from natural disaster as a lingering element of premodern consciousness. It makes complete sense in an enchanted world, but it’s hard to make sense of it in a disenchanted one, even if you are a religious believer in it. I think there is a way, though, that prayer makes perfect sense in a disenchanted world. But one has first to understand the shift in the way the "buffered self" experiences the sacred from the outer world to the inner world. This is a theme I have already explored to a certain extent in a post called From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen.
It shouldn’t be a surprise for Christians that things should have developed in this outer-to-inner pattern, since we are told repeatedly in the gospels that the coming of the Christ meant the inauguration of the Kingdom within. And so when the experience of the gods (by which I mean the spiritual dimension of reality) moves gradually from out-there to in-here, there is a corresponding shift from an experience of being the puppets or playthings of the gods, to being a new kind human who has autonomy, dignity, and freedom. And this experience requires as a precondition that humans become detached or disembedded from the world out-there which contrasts with the enmeshment with out-there that characterizes the experience of normal premoderns.
Christians like me embrace the disenchantment of the cosmos as an
uncomfortable, but important necessary step to allow for the emergence
of the free human individuality. In the premodern world, there was an
oppressive sense of being overwhelmed by or manipulated by beings in
the spiritual world. Encounters with the beings there made humans feel
so small, weak, and insignificant in comparison. It was as if in order
to grow up humans had to shut them out so that they could come into
thei own. But it does not necessarily follow that because humans
repressed it, it does not exist. So there are two implications here
that might make traditional, especially reformed-tradition Christians
uncomfortable. First, I don’t think of the human being as completely
depraved and helpless. Second, I think it unlikely that the world, in
itself is in fact disenchanted, even if our experience of it is. For
me it is an interesting question how once human autonomy and freedom
are more securely established, humans need to open up again to that
world they have so successfully repressed. That’s at least in part what
I mean by second naivete.
What interests me about Taylor is that he is essentially describing
in considerably more detail the same process that Owen Barfield
describes in his book Saving the Appearances, which I discuss
in the above-mentioned "From Outer to Inner". It’s the emergence of a
new kind of consciousness from what Barfield calls "original
participation", into a different kind of human being Taylor calls "the
buffered self". Original participation is a state that is most extreme
in animistic and shamanic societies, and it is characterized by what
Taylor calls the "porous self", a self that is radically open if not
fused with the spirit world world around him or her, including the
world of spirits, faeries, demons, angels, and gods/goddesses.
For the porous self lives in a world characterized by original
participation, and as such his identity is fused with the tribal and
totemic identity, with the natural world around him, and with the
larger cosmos in which all that subsists. Everything is connected and
interwoven. It’s hard to tell where I end and everything else begins.
For the porous self’s sense of self as me-over-here separated from
everything-else-over-there, the sense of a subject-object split, is
simply not part of its existential experience. It lives in a world that
is more like the world of "Princess Mononoke"
than the world of "Blade Runner", a world of nature spirits rather than
cyborgs. The cyborg–the human machine–is what the buffered self
evolves into unless the human self finds a way, genuinely and without
losing its freedom, autonomy, and dignity, to reopen itself to the
spiritual world.
Moderns, however, do sometimes have "peak experiences" in which all
the boundaries break down, and people who have this experience report
how it has given them insight into the "oneness" of everything.
Pantheism is an attempt to philosophize from such experiences. But
theism requires a sense of separation, of face-to-face, of me here You
there. In Christian theism, there is even separation within the
Godhead, which is a communion of three persons that participate in one
being. I think the goal for humans is to become similarly a community
of created "persons" that participate in One Being. But participating
and merging are not the same thing, not if merging means losing one’s
sense of self and identity as a free individual. Christian theism is
not about merging, but about freedom, differentiation, and communion.
Moving out of the condition of the porous self is a necessary step in
the realization of freedom and differentiation, what remains is the
movement forward into communion.
For those for whom the concept of the "porous self" seem strange, think of the world Homer depicts in the Iliad.
Homeric humanity illustrates how the porous self it typified was not
free, although Odysseus is the beginning of something new. Although
I’ve given the following example before, I need to repeat it to stress
the point I want to make here. I remember when I first read about the
confrontation between Achilles and Hector, and Hector lost it and was
overcome by panic and was chased around the walls by Achilles, none of
the Trojans thought Hector had disgraced himself by such cowardly
behavior. I wondered why. Barfield and Taylor explain it by their
ideas about original participation and the porous self.
Homeric-era Greeks would not have thought Hector personally
responsible for his actions. No one saw Hector as having failed, but
rather the gods having abandoned Hector. And since the Greek gods owed
humans nothing, that was just bad luck. Hector was a hero not because
there was anything particularly heroic about Hector the man in our
contemporary understanding of the word, but because he was favored by
Apollo or whichever god of the moment wanted the Trojans to win. In
other words, the Greek heroes are puppets; it’s not they who are
fighting but the gods who use them as their chess pieces. A hero is
someone who is especially favored by the gods who use him for their own
purposes. Once the god abandons him, he’s a scared little man running
around the walls. Not his fault. But bad luck for the rest of us. If
our hero loses, it means the gods have abandoned us.
Now I would argue that when people pray for better weather, it
really is a vestige of this older consciousness in which there was a
hierarchy of gods on the lower levels of which were the weather gods.
According to Eliade and other ethnographers, many animist societies had
the idea of One God, the supreme deity, but didn’t really bother much
with him because he was so remote and unconcerned with the local goings
on. Eliade and other ethnographers call such a god the "deus otiosus". The people in these societies didn’t concern themselves too much with the deus otiosus
because he didn’t seem too concerned with human affairs. So they turned
their attention to the more local gods, the nature spirits, gods of the
hearth, and so forth. Those gods could be supplicated, and they could
provide practical help. The tribal shaman was called in for
particularly difficult cases because he was an initiate, a man of
knowledge, who best understood the ways of these local gods.
Now Judaism after Moses was pretty ruthless about requiring the Jews
to disengage with these local gods. The Jewish revelation was that the
Deus Otiosus had a name, and he was coming out of retirement,
and that he cared. Barfield talks in a very compelling way of the role
the Jews played in the emergence out of original participation, and of
the essential role played in those developments by their near-obsessive
monotheism and rejection of the ordinary religious consciousness of the
peoples which surrounded them. Once again mature theism requires
differntiation and separation. The first step was to separate out of
the surrounding culture seeped in original participation. When
Christianity came along, it emerged in the context of a pluralistic
culture of mystery religions that pervaded the Roman Empire, and when
Christianity emerged as the dominant narrative among those mystery
religions and spread through Europe, it absorbed into itself much of
the animistic consciousness of the shamanic cultures of the Germans and
Celts. The monotheism was there, but deemphasized.
So popular Christianity during the medieval period was an amalgam of
Jewish Monotheism and pagan animism, with this peculiar intermediary
figure, Jesus, who seemed to have a foot in both worlds. He was the
human face of the deus otiosus, and he had an intimate and very
direct connection to human affairs. In the medieval Catholic cosmology
there was the implicit understanding that there were evil spirits and
good, helpful spirits, and Jesus, Mary Queen of Angels, Michael the
archangel, and the hosts of heaven in the communion of saints–the
cloud of witnesses–cared deeply and passionately about human affairs.
And they longed to play a role in them, but could only do so if they
were asked.
That’s the key to understanding intercessory prayer, and I would
suggest, without trying to make a full-bore argument about it, that the
difference between Christian relationship with the spiritual world and
the pagan understanding. And while it was still immature during the
medieval period and still had much of the spirit of pagan propitiatory
prayer, the Christian idea of intercession holds within it the
beginning of the idea of spiritual freedom–because the all-powerful
creator god reveals himself as the suffering servant who does not
command or manipulate like the pagan gods–but seeks to liberate humans
from the compulsivity that characterized the older religious
consciousness.
All of this is very interesting and needs more time than I can give
it here to unravel how all these layers of things influence our
peculiar early postmodern consciousness. But to me the interesting
thing is Taylor’s recounting how the purist, iconoclastic monotheistic
strain in Judaism was picked up by the iconoclastic disenchanting
Protestant reformers, particularly in the Calvinist stream, and had the
unintended consequence of setting the stage on the one hand for God
reverting to a deus otiosus in Deism, which was a preliminary stage to we humans having killed him sometime in the 19th century, according to Nietzsche.
Or, on the other hand, of setting the stage for the contradictory God
who if he has the power to stop things like the holocaust or tsunamis,
must be a monster to have allowed them in the first place. Better that
he were dead.
So when it comes to the weather, I’d guess that Governor Perdue
doesn’t think there could be any such thing as weather spirits–that
would be too pagan. (I’m agnostic on the matter myself. Maybe in some
Findhornish way it’s possible to find a way to work with such beings to
bring the rain. Not a concern of mine at the moment.) But his prayers
probably have more to do with that old pagan propitiation than they do
with mature Christian intercessory prayer–which at its deepest level
is about asking for clarity and wisdom in the use of one’s conscience
and freedom.
The mature Christian does not expect an all-powerful God to
dramatically break into time/space to manipulate nature in marvelous
ways. I don’t doubt that he could, if he chose to, but that’s not how
the suffering-servant God works. The earth and its future is a human
project. It’s on us humans, not God. But nothing we humans do is good
unless it’s inspired by grace. And that’s the key to prayer–not to
ask God to get it done, but to ask for the wisdom or inspiration that
will enable us to get it done. And there is help there for us if we
choose to avail ourselves of it.
UPDATE: Writing this post reminded me to the poem that first most
powerfully described to me our conditions as moderns, Eliot’s "The
Wasteland". Here’s an excerpt from the section entitled The Fire Sermon:
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette endsOr other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
When I first read Eliot’s poem in late adolescence, I didn’t
understand it, but it became an emblem for me of our conditions as
moderns and also implicit in it a kind of beacon of hope for it also
pointed to an honest, authentic way out, a way Eliot, a flawed man as
we all are, found not too long after having written this poem. The
"Four Quartet," "The Family Reunion," and "The Cocktail Party" are a
testament both to his flaws and to his liberation.
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