How to See God

Why was Christianity so transparently bogus--or, at least, without substance--to me as a young adult--and to some of my intelligent, well-read friends but not to others? It's easy to say that people believe whatever makes them feel good, to dismiss faith as mindless conformity and intellectual shoddiness. 

As social media makes clear, people often read a sentence as meaning how they feel when they read it, not as what the grammar and definitions factually add up to. The mainstream media make everything into a crisis, a friend wrote yesterday. Everything? I missed CNN coverage of my afternoon nap. OK, my forty years as a comp teacher are showing. Climbing off my pedagogical high horse, I'll note that two kinds of reading, his and mine, yield two distinct meanings, one absurd and the other reasonable. One is nonsensical, the other merely a hyperbole--a figure of speech. Seeming credulity may be this kind of difference: reading religious language, not as word-for-word matter-of-fact, but as it moves the spirit.

I get this. I've not only taught poems, but published a good many. Still, I've had a lifelong preference (in life-or-death matters of fact anyway) for saying what you mean, not its first cousin. But it seems pretty obvious that, if religion is about life or death, it's not a matter of fact--not a set of propositions that can be objectively tested and proved true or false. Indeed (as I wrote in my second posting, "Kalashnikov Truth"), religious teachers avoid making falsifiable predictions so that their teachings, however strange, can't disproved by nonbelievers. Crede ut intellegas, wrote Augustine, "Believe that you may understand." Justification of faith seems to be circular, demanding that you buy a pig in a poke. If you're unbiased, you don't understand. How does this make any sense? Suppose we distinguish between language describing a situation of fact and language describing technique or practice: language of what is and language of how to.

The Dalai Lama has repeatedly described Buddhism as a technique for achieving happiness--not so much a religion as an empirical practice. He doesn't say, "Believe that the Buddha achieved enlightenment by overcoming the distractions of the demon Devapulta Mara under the Bodhi Tree and thou shalt be saved." His message is more like, "Realize through constant practice of right thought and action the transience of your ego and the world, and you may as a result become happy." You can't be sure that the Dalai Lama's technique will work for you, of course, until you put it into practice. Just agreeing with him accomplishes nothing. 

It's normal for practical things not to be clear until we implement them. Lists of instructions are opaque. You can't know the pleasures of Paris by just agreeing to take a trip there. The only way to know if John Thompson's Modern Course for the Piano works for you is to open the book and practice (though its popularity makes it a good bet). The same applies to religion. Whenever we're promised a method to reach an ultimately indescribable goal--sensory, practical, or spiritual--then Augustine's Crede ut intellegas makes perfect sense.

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, writing as the spiritual guide of a novice Christian contemplative, takes this pragmatic approach, advising his pupil to forget everything he "knows" about himself or God, everything but his own naked existence and absolute love. The author would rather "have my loving desire kindled for the feeling of God, than all the subtle and ingenious imaginings or meditations that can be told or found written in books, however holy they might be and however beautiful they might seem to the subtle eye of your ingenious intellect" (The Book of Privy Counseling, Chapter 8). The guide's teachings aren't facts, not anything to be affirmed in words from a book, but instructions, in effect, to believe nothing.

The contemplative must command even his holiest thoughts (such as remembering God's kind deeds) to "get down" as if they were temptations. He must empty his mind of all but a one-syllable mantra because "as you see this and think about that, it will bring to mind some place where you lived before this time. So that in the end, before you know it, you will be scattered, you know not where" (The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 7). God, who is beyond all intelligible creeds or doctrines, "may well be loved, but not thought" (Chapter 6). The author of the Cloud is orthodox in that he takes for granted that the mass and confession are effective preparation for contemplation even if they eventually become distractions. Earthbound devotions help to raise the fledgling soul to a place where contemplation of a transcendent is possible, but they are like the car that you drive to the airport. You can't fly to your destination without leaving it behind. The contemplative must discard all language of what is to implement the Cloud author's how to.

Here is a kind of transcendental pragmatism. Suppose that scriptures, rites, creeds, and doctrines are crude scaffolding inviting us to something beyond them, something utterly different from and hidden by them. Devotees who have scaled the jerry-built fabrication of religion and glimpsed (even visited) a golden temple shrouded by it--a house with no mortal bedrooms--may appear to be worshipping rusty scaffolding, but those pipes are not the (non)thing-in-itself at all. Theistic faiths agree in their theologies, if not in their liturgies, that the creator God is beyond being, not definable, not a person or thing we can delineate by excluding all non-members of a logical God-set. If anything existed outside the set of God and the creations he inhabits, this would imply two creators, two grounds of being. "God is no thing, but not nothing," wrote Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe, encapsulating orthodoxy in a Zen-like paradox. 

The God of classical theology is absolute being that (going back to the Cloud author) may be loved, perhaps known, but never understood. In the words of the Sikh morning prayer, "By thinking, He cannot be reduced to thought, even by thinking hundreds of thousands of times." Johns Scotus, the 9th-century Irish theologian, puts it this way: "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." As the creator of existence, God cannot be reduced to his own creation.

Given this unfalsifiable (non)definition, any denial of God amounts to denial that anything exists--or, at least, denial (again unfalsifiably but counter to the testimony of legions of mystics and visionaries) that there is a unity to existence that human beings can meaningfully be in relation with. All of this, of course, is inconceivably vague unless intuitively held. Reverence for Ground of Being is a sort of pious agnosticism, knowingly kneeling before a Cloud of Unknowing: in Christian iconography, Moses in the dark cloud that surround Mount Sinai.

Atheists typically deny far more specific mythological, moral, or ecclesiastical images of the term God, images that project human values, morals, aims, traits, and desires, even the human shape, against the cosmos and make idols of ideology, claiming divine authority at the level of social structure and morals. Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe undercuts this kind of atheism by agreeing with it: "God tends to be just a great projection into the sky of our moral feelings, especially our guilt-feelings. But I don't believe in God if that's what he is" (Faith within Reason, 2007, p. 155). My soon-to-be-posted survey of an atheist website, "Memes of the Anti-God," finds most of its attacks to be on this projected culture-god and his bullying churches. 

I can't resist sharing a diatribe against religion-as-moral-policing from my new favorite Christian commentary, The Cloud of Unknowing, condensed here but translated literally to keep the feel of the Middle English: "Some men the fiend will deceive in this manner. Full wonderfully he will enflame their brains to maintain God's law and to destroy sin in all other men. He will never tempt them with a thing that is apparently evil. All men will they reprove for their faults. And they say that they are stirred thereto by the fire of charity and of God's love in their hearts. And truly they lie, for it is with the fire of hell welling in their brains and in their imagination" (Chapter 55). Herbert McCabe puts this less sensationally. The petty "god" of human morality and guilt, he says, is an odd thing for any Christian to believe in because, "You could say that the main theme of the preaching of Jesus is that God isn't like that at all" (p. 155).

A God who doesn't visibly smite, reward, and dictate laws, but is simply the ineffable source of all being--who is discovered only through self-denial and contemplation--can easily be dismissed. There's nothing to see here. Move along. Such a (non)being may seem a product of mysticism in the low sense: vague speculation, a belief without sound basis. Maybe a trick of words like the illusion that "cold fire" exists because it can be verbalized. Ordinary people with a living to make and children to raise are more interested in religions of ceremony, belonging, etiquette, forgiveness, status, and prosperity in sects that nurture and sustain the practical ego-sense. So it's quite reasonable for those who reject this practical sort of theism (especially if it's presented in the form of magical stories) to call themselves atheists and shrug off the God of mysticism and abstract theology. If the God who can't be denied is (as McCabe says) no thing, then he can be ignored. "Nothing will come of nothing."  Unless, of course, something has already come of it.

There is ample evidence, however subjective, that millennia of saints and gurus have experienced transcendent being. Even if such experiences through contemplation and self-surrender are rare, the sense that "I and the father are one" is at the core of most religions. In Christopher Isherwood's groundbreaking anthology, Vedanta for the Western World (1948), Aldous Huxley identifies a "minimum working hypothesis" of world religions that "there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void which is the unmanifest principle of all manifestations" and that the purpose of life is achieve unitive knowledge of this principle" (p. 34). This is the "beatific vision" in orthodox Christianity. Holy persons of many sects have described, in terms of many languages, traditions, and cultures, similar practices to achieve this unitive vision--teachings that are not philosophy or science, but rather like spiritual recipe books to be proved in the kitchen, not in the study. If they are matters of fact, the fact is that the teacher has experienced ecstatic unity with "the purpose of life" and that his teachings are his honest advice for approaching that state. All practitioners agree that it transcends language, so there is no possibility--in my earlier wording--of "saying what they mean, not its first cousin."