American Pie, Redux Edition.

~by David Aiken~

Gary Price's The Thinker

§ Do You Recall What was Revealed/

The Day that Thinking Died…?

In last month’s reprised Phrontisterion essay, entitled Sightedness, there is this statement in our consideration of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “More than a simple exercise in morality, however, Macbeth is also a study in the different types of ambiguities that exist, or that can exist, in a world in which gods, and knowledge touching upon gods, are hidden behind an impenetrable cloak of obscurity. This is precisely the problem in the ‘world’ of Christianity, after all: that knowledge has been replaced by belief; and, at best, belief is subject to any All and Sundry’s uninformed, blind, interpretation.”

A Christian Reader responded at some length to the premise of this idea. 

I liked your piece but felt like I had to take you to task on it… […]"For now we see through a glass darkly".  These are the words spoken by a man many years after his own blind eyes were made to see.  Before making this proclamation he also said, "For we know in part", acknowledging that for all of the enlightenment given to him, and acquired over the course of a lifetime, he remained, essentially, in the dark.  And is that not the real plight of everyman as clearly reflected in the literary treatises of the world?

What world literature demonstrates time and again is that everyman, in every literary culture of the world, has struggled with the question of - "what lies beyond the veil after the silver cord is cut?".  And ultimately, everyman must come to terms with the fact that this is just as unknowable as the question of "where did we come from?".  And so we see the writers of great literature puzzling over these great questions and illustrating both the questions and the struggles through the lives of the characters in their stories.  The endurance of these stories over time lies in their ability to resonate with a particular audience.  The real question about the stories may not be so much in whether they are factually true in every detail as it is about their ability to inspire the Christian Reader in a way that motivates him or her to strive to be something greater than the natural bent of his or her character.  The problem with the non-Christian world is the tendency to embrace those stories that affirm their natural bent and to reject those that challenge their own sense of self-goodness.

When considered objectively, the "Christian" narrative is quite different from the other narratives in the world which employ a device representing an appeal to some sort of divinity. The gods of world literature are fickle, selfish, narcissistic, and cruel.  While the same may be said for the portrayal of the God of the Old Testament, the Christian narrative is radically different.  Accept it as historical fact, or reject it as pure mythology, there is no denying that the message of the narrative is drastically unlike any other literary story in the world.  One may stumble over the essential premise that all men are sinners deserving of death, but God's answer to that problem is a narrative far superior to any other story ever written from the beginning of time.

It is the story of the Divine Person leaving His lofty and Holy abode in order to take residency in the humble state of humanity and then to take it upon Himself to pay the penalty that everyman deserves and thus free everyman from the condemnation that was the ultimate outcome of his humanity.  One may reject the idea that such a narrative is even necessary, but only in the world of Alice can it be denied that this narrative represents the highest form of ethical construction ever conceived, either before or since His time; the ethic which says that love drives a man to lay down his own life for another.

[One] may object to the premise that everyman stands guilty in the eyes of the Christian God and thus reject the free gift that he offers in the form of a pardon.  I personally find myself lacking the ability to rise to His ethical standard. 

§ “Did you write the book of love /
And do you have faith in God above /
If the Bible tells you so?”

While an essayist may love the idea of an engaged Readership, Christian or not, it is not quite clear that this Christian Reader is actually “taking me to task” for any particular ideas from the Sightedness essay! The Apostle Paul does perhaps says more universally and more eloquently with his “now we see darkly,” what my essay also expressed, with a perhaps poorer image, of the Christian Everyman’s self-ordained Protesting right to interpret the Writ, heedless of insight, sightedness, or competence; but then I have no quarrel with Paul’s thinking, and, in fact, obviously side with his impression on this question. To be Uninformed is to be Blind in the truest sense of that word.

I also agree with the “uniqueness” point the Christian Reader raises about the Christian narrative. However, it would seem that some of our conclusions clearly differ about possible meanings surrounding that uniqueness. The reasoning animal has the native right, as well as an inherited obligation to those who will come after, to ponder and consider the world around him – such is, at any rate, the premise advanced not only by the philosophical traditions of the pagan thinkers, but also by Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and a long line Christian thinkers. Consequently, I do not consider the uniqueness of any mytho-narrative, and particularly that of the Christian tradition, to be a selling feature. Because the Christian narrative has been constructed over long centuries by interested parties, and is therefore no longer either well-grounded in the Biblical texts nor propositionally neutral in terms of its historical value. Nor are the texts themselves, when considered in their own right as documents of history, necessarily competent and neutral records of historical events. Also, because it is possible to measure the Christianly constructed Theological Narrative over and against the biblical texts, which activity yields any number of irregularities to thinking or to reason, i.e., paradoxes or irrationalities, it is becoming more and more apparent to Thinking Man that neither the Christian narrative nor the biblical texts make a particularly strong showing in the cold and unforgiving light of Thoughtful, Reasoned Day. Unfortunately. Because thinking about these matters would be so much easier were all the records of human historical experience clean and simple, and the Christian stories more reliant on the Biblical records.

We have made the case elsewhere that, as a part of its historical inheritance, the Christian story (Jesus + Messiah) has neither intrinsic ethic nor worldview, both of which it borrowed from surrounding thought cultures, infinitely more from Greek philosophy than from Jewish religion. This reminder is relevant to our Christian Reader’s question in a follow-up essay: “How is it then, that in this day and age, Christian sermons appear to be more structured as philosophical arguments? Why is it that sermons today sound more like persuasion than proclamation? Is it possible that Christianity has somehow lost its way by straying from the essence and structure of the original message?”

            It is clear that the Christian Reader’s conclusion is that we should jettison all the highfaluting philosophical trappings of Christian historical theology, and should, much like Martin Luther of old, return again ad fontes in order to refresh ourselves in the cool waters of the original “pristine” proclamation of the Jesus message. However, that “original” message is also itself, unfortunately, indelibly framed by the historicized and edited and philosophically informed interpretative traditions that religions have found for the biblical texts in general; and these doctrinal traditions invite us, unavoidably, to interpret the Message, which is far less pristine than many imagine, some through literalism, others through mythology, and still others through metaphor or allegory.

Where does the “Truth” lay in that minefield?

           

§ “And we sang dirges in the dark /
The day the music died”

There are entire libraries dedicated to the study of the Judeo-Christian texts and teachings, and one will find ferreted away in the most obscure corners of those libraries all the research that concerns the connections of Judeo-Christianity to Greek philosophy, Jewish religion, and other ancient Near Eastern religions and mythologies. The evidence is prodigious, both from within the biblical texts and from without, that Christian doctrine and hence the Christian system of belief is the reasoning handiwork of human philosophical speculation. This evidence extends all the way up to the heavens themselves to embrace the profile of the Christian God -- He is a creature of whole-cloth philosophical speculation. This is not to say that there are no gods, only that they have been constrained and therefore changed by our interpretive framings and filters. There is no pristine narrative fountain to go back to—all information, all data, is woven into the warp and woof of our understanding through our thinking and our words… and transformed in and by that action.

            If this is in fact an accurate assessment of the way in which truth becomes truthful for Men, with all of the dangers and foibles that beset that way, then the Christian Reader’s frustration will only increase by remaining committed to the method of trying to go back to some “original” message, which is suggested in a responsive essay later penned by our Christian Reader.

“The central idea [of this essay] is simply that Christianity was never intended to be a philosophy. Philosophy draws from various sources of knowledge and employs the tools of reason and logic to ascertain truth. The fact is that the truth presented by the life and teachings of Jesus could never be arrived at by reason and logic. Even with the source of knowledge provided by the Old Testament scriptures, it required additional revelation in order for the disciples of Jesus to grasp the truth of who he was and what he was accomplishing. It was not reason and logic that revealed these things to the disciples, it was the divine revelation afforded by Jesus himself.”

[…]

“Perhaps it is well past time to rethink Christianity altogether and to begin divorce proceedings with the philosophical concepts which have obscured and corrupted the original message. The original gospel was meant to be proclaimed not deduced. And the followers of Christ were never instructed to develop cleverly designed arguments intended to persuade. Like the Dude, they were merely instructed to abide (John 15:4-7, 10, KJV).”

For these reasons, at the very least, the Christian Reader’s conclusion to return ad fontes is simply not compelling. The study of philosophy and religion would be so much more convenient were it really the case that we could simply open a Book, almost any book, to discover the truth about our past and ourselves. But things are never that easy!

            Instead, it seems that the gods have stepped completely out of the world… and that We Mortals are left alone to explain however we may, rationally and irrationally, the ostensibly closed-system vacuum in this existential puzzle-paradise we call Our World. This kind of study is not about what might truly have been Once Upon a Time in the youthful days of Man’s adventures in the world, but rather whether knowledge of those days can be deciphered by Us today with any degree of reasonability or reliability. And in this playing field all the available evidence seems to point to the factum that we are alone in the world—left to sort ourselves out, however we may or may choose, with the other co-inhabitants of this Place.

To return again to the idea of narrative “uniqueness,” and linked to that idea, the Christian Reader also makes an appeal to the high ethical standards of the Christian God. Yet this, precisely, is what I do not have the sight to see. The rhetoric of faith has it that God is just; but can we really not “hear” the words of the Christian argument: that the Justice of this Christian God is to slaughter an Innocent Son of His, which act, magically, has some value, individually, for a world full of human failure. This is no act of Justice; and it is in fact and to the very highest degree, profoundly Unjust. Therefore, at the very least the interpretation that Christian Theology has given to this act must change. Even should I accept the historical death of Jesus, the narrative that reads this as an act of Justice is unacceptable to reasoning and just men. This is no justice that Men can divine, therefore it is not justice… just an unusual and irrational narrative that asks us to understand as justice an act that is not just, in diametrical opposition to the justice of one such as Socrates, which is clear and reasonable, and has the virtue of making the just man also the beautiful man.

            So it has long seemed to me that the Christian narrative must have taken a wrong turn at some point in its history to arrive at this conclusion about Christian Justice, which is no Justice at all, or at least not any type of Justice known to men who have been thinking about justice since the dawn of human history. My interest and the years of my study have always been dedicated to finding out where these types of thinking mistakes were made in the history of constructing the Christian narrative, and then to trying my hand at reconstructing a better narrative interpretation. Because for me it is to insult Reason itself to attribute to God, for example, a notion of Justice that is actually its exact opposite—an injustice. This is to render God irrational, and, by extension, the crown of His creation intellectually vacuous. To ask anyone to then believe such a narrative in an act of faith, is evil.

§ “And in the streets, the children screamed /
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed /
But not a word was spoken /
The church bells all were broken”

Thinking died for Christianity on a summer’s day in Nicaea (in what is today Turkey) in the year 325 A.D.

           

Belief and the death of thinking…

It is imperative that we do not simply take up our intellectual abode in the authority surrounding the various ideas that we have held dear and in which we are persuaded to put our faith; but we must insist on putting to the test everything, both in- and outside our authoritarian belief box—our Truth, in order to determine whether our reasons and our reasoning are and remain equitable. It is only in this manner, after all, that we keep justice or rightness [Dίκη] in Thinking. In this respect I am much like the cultivated Greek of the 2^nd century transplanted into the 21^st century… I have chosen to take a stand concerning my Thinking Life using logismos, reasoned conviction, which is grounded in the archaic notion of phronesis or intellectual insight, and which is the rational basis for the ancient Greek philosophical virtues of courage, self-control, and justice. It is an interesting irony of history that these same Stoic philosophical virtues would be quickly subsumed into Christian Thought, except for the grounding virtue of phronesis.

            It has become a reasonable choice for me, then, that I would disdain the religious conception of pistis or faith, an inferior conception of “knowledge” derived from a Platonic thought tradition, which embodies intellectual “blindness” in the sense that it is irrational and unexamined. According to E. R. Dodds (Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, 1968, 120ff), faith “was the state of mind of the uneducated [Greeks], who believe things on hearsay without being able to give reasons for their belief.” It is an unfortunate circumstance of history that the Apostle Paul would come to represent “as the very foundation of the Christian life” the idea of pistis instead of logismos.

            To sketch out briefly the lines of the history of an idea, in our West pistis would become the foundational or sine qua non virtue for framing religious belief, both among Christians and later Neo-Platonist philosophers. So it seems to me that we are in dire need of a new Reformation, that it is high time we began to challenge again the statu quo of Christian arguments and beliefs that were, frankly, intellectually obscure and therefore barely plausible on the day the ink was still drying on the Council codicils—indeed, it still offends Intelligence that the Church was brazen enough to encourage thinking men, on pain of death, to accept “concepts” that were already defined as paradoxes and articles of faith in that day, and which today are simply whacky. In this New World of ours, in order to matter Christianity must return to a even earlier age, to a day when logismos mattered more than pistis. The life of the Church depends on it; and if it does not happen, then in due course Christianity will take its place alongside other narratives for children and those of more simple faith as merely another variation on a Mother Goose theme, or as another moral tale that will eventually fade away because it does not make any sense. This was Nietzsche’s prediction.

            So at the Council of Nicaea, in 325 C.E., an authoritarian or authoritative “Truth” concerning the Christian message was codified—God was defined as triune. And Thinking died. Ever since, those who have not been persuaded by the details of the specific interpretative ‘truth’ articulated and promulgated at Nicaea have been systematically anathematized—sentenced to spend eternity in hell. And, yet, if truth be told, even Paul and his NT conceptualization about the Cosmic Christ, does not belong to post-Nicaean Christianity. If one may judge by the Pauline and distinctly non-Trinitarian gospel-kerygma he leaves behind in his first letter to the Corinthians (Ch. 15)–

“Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.”

After Nicaea, only the filters of Nicaean Christianity became the acceptable measure of interpretative truth about the Christian message, which puts Paul and many others, myself included, in pretty much the same rudderless boat at some 2000 years remove—hell-bound.

            Perhaps the Christ crucified was Paul’s idea of a skandalon, a stumbling block, or foolishness (I Cor. 1:23); it would seem, however, that he should have reserved that kind of tag for the resurrection, which is, if ever there was, an event of a mythological order in the fine narrative tradition of dying and resurrecting gods, such as Dionysius and Osiris. Men’s dying for one another is an act that is generous and beautiful in the world of human history; Gods’ dying and resurrecting, on the other hand, seems only to have echo in the world of legends and myths. Against the empirical and crushing weight of a world given over to material death and decay, the literal interpretation of the NT stories of bodily resurrections, of Lazarus [Jn. 11], Jairus’s daughter [Mk. 5:35ff], Tabitha [Acts 9:36ff], and of Jesus himself, are simply too unique to belong meaningfully to real-time and literal interpretations without some sort of reasonable support from empirical sources. Such events as these are more at home in mythological time than in historical time; and their meanings are actually much more meaningful in that former realm of translation.

            Professor Ehrman, an American Professor of Religious Studies, has suggested that new research is pointing to the fact that maybe Jesus was pretty sure he was a prophet, but that the texts do not support that he thought himself a god… “Did Jesus think he was God? New insights on Jesus’ own self-image. And so the intrigue continues and will not be solved here today.

§ “And the three men I admire most /
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost /
They caught the last train for the coast /
The day the music died.”

To return again to the theme of uniqueness – imagine that, in a universe where planets all rotate in one direction, one day, one planet decides to rotate in the counter direction, only for one day. Then it becomes sensible again and spins merrily along in harmony with the other planets. Imagine, as well, that there is some witness of or evidence for this occurrence. This, one might argue, is a unique event—an historical singularity no less so than any mathematical singularity; and even if there were some record of its occurrence, every reasonable man would be absolutely in his right mind to question the “meaning” or “possible consequences” of such an unusual event. So it is also with resurrections when they are literally read, and not interpreted as myths and metaphors.

            It is indisputable that such events as resurrections have mytho-meaning, but it simply is not so clear that they have much reasonable or inherent currency in a heavily physical dimension, such as ours, which is dominated, saturated by raw empirical subsistence. This is the difference between the stories of resurrections when read by Jewish Pharisees, who were always literalists, and the same exact stories read by Jewish Sadducees, who were anything but literalists. In the first instance, one argues that the resurrection has empirical value, as real-time event, and in the second instance, one reads the resurrection as metaphor, as a spiritual transformation or conversion of the individual to a new life. From an interpretative point of view, it is simply not possible to make plausibly the case that the non-literalist interpretation of the event is not the correct (or the also correct) first reading.

           

So, at the end of the day, it seems that my being “taken to task” by our Christian Reader is actually related to the idea that I do not take a specific Christian stance concerning the questions I raise. Yet I cannot take this stance with such a flawed, yet I think perhaps ultimately fixable narrative. This fixing is the story of my scholarly life.

Simple Belief darkens the mind. Kierkegaard, in his essay “Every Good and Perfect Gift,” (p. 32), seems to allude to this passive darkness of the mind in response to a text from the NT book of James:

“’Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.’ So they sat in their quiet sorrow; they did not harden themselves against the consolation of the word; they were humble enough to acknowledge that life is a dark saying, and as in their thought they were swift to listen to see if there might be an explanatory word, so were they also slow to speak and slow to wrath. They did not presume to give up the word; they longed only for the opportune hour to come. If that came, then they would be saved.”

In this redux version of American Pie: Do You recall what was revealed / The Day that Thinking Died…?