The Pagan Temptation by Thomas Molnar |
"Christianity differs from other religions in its self-confident reliance on faith, reason, and history together; it never renounces any of them." -Thomas Molnar, The Pagan Temptation. |
Faith and reason produce interesting chemistry in the mind of anyone who tries to mix them. So does a cocktail of faith and history. In this postmodern age, when the neat separation of these disciplines has dissolved in the dawning realization of layered complexity, the suggestion that they have always been brothers under the Christian flag, seems a bit of a stretch. Leonard Sweet in his book, Soul Tsunami, says we are in a pre-Christian age, because the difficulties that have given rise to postmodernism, the exact difficulty Nicholas of Cusa had in integrating Pagan and Christian truth, have brought to light a startling realization. Much of life is paradoxical. And paradoxes waft up from western thought at the end of this century like ghostly vapour in a swamp. For example: - God can not be proven rationally, yet he can only be know with a rational mind. - Our society is based on violence and aggression but we despise violent acts. - People can be both diabolical and angelic. - The stuff of which the world is made is, on the quantum level, as likely to exist as not exist. There is, in a way, more space in our bodies than substance. Everything we see is some sort of emergent field of being that is tenuous at best. - All the evidence points to the existence of God, but there is not enough to be universally convincing. - We need to have moral standards of right and wrong, but real morality is compassionate and forgiving and does not judge. - Intellectual inquiry produces a remarkable need for myth. Immersion in myth produces a longing for rational verification. It goes on and on. But one thing is clear: The cross pollination of science and religion has produced the most fruitful tree of questions a person could every want. Others, of course, think that such a tree can only produce sour grapes. Which brings me to this book, at last. Who is this Thomas Molnar? Some obscure, ultra-conservative scholar no one has ever heard of. Try doing a search for Mr. Molnar on the net. A few cryptic references to his books, little mention of The Pagan Temptation. Like so many important events in life, the reading of a book can not be understood in isolation. This book waited for me for almost two years. When I finally bought it on sale, It verily grabbed me by the throat! "The pagan thinker regarded the soul as subtly material: the Stoic sage considered it part of the fiery world-soul, and the Epicurean postulated no soul at all but only material particles - cohesive heaps of them, as Lucretius suggested." - Molnar Even though I had studied the subject before, it was through Molnar that I remembered and came to see that it was Epicurus who concluded that the universe contains only matter and void and that human beings, their intelligence and cognition, are an accident of organic life. Epicurus lived in Greece, before the birth of Jesus. Materialism was in full bloom in the pagan world that predated Christianity. So what is this Paganism? I had always thought of Pagans as tribal hordes, dancing around bon fires worshiping idols and performing secret initiations. Molnar showed me that for pagans, the goal was to become a Sage. Sages, which latter included the Gnostics, saw the world as basically a failed attempt by God or the Gods to make something that we, in our humanness, do not know. All we know, according to the Sages, is that it didn't work. Creation was a botched job, a catastrophic explosion of the divine into shards of reality that became the reality we know. Perhaps the only saving end will be when all the fragmented particles of God return back out of the world. The goal of ancient paganism ,then, was to rise from lower consciousness by fostering distance from and contempt for the shattered state, the body, the world, and any lower thought. This, Thomas tells us is real pagan fundamentals. This was the wisdom of Greece, and Rome and, though Molnar does not say it, Egypt too. Onto this scene came nascent Christianity exalting the notion that spirit was made flesh in an act of special divine grace for the sake of mankind, just the opposite of what the sages taught. What is more, this spirit made flesh was the central object of worship as a God-Man who suffered torments in his flesh, shed tears, felt betrayed, and predicted with an infinite sorrow the destiny of his Holy city. The Sages saw in humans only a particle of the divine worthy of re-absorption into God. The body and even the soul were mere trappings of some long term education project the divine was conducting for itself. Christianity with its insistence on the resurrection of the body was an oddity at the outside, and a sore adversary for the most part. According to Pierre Duhem, quoted in Molnar, the failure of Greek science to continue on the path to modernity was due to the influence of this pagan view of the questionable use of bodily existence. To Christianity not only was the universe not a mistake, it was not either, as the pantheists suggested, a Divine given. It was open to investigation and management. For Christians, God was not outside the universe, nor was he made up of the Universe. God permeates the universe and so to study the Universe is to study the creation of God. Today there is a resurgence of Paganism in response to the failure of the modernity that Christianity spawned. The saints, in the past as now, were motivated to eliminate suffering and injustice. But as in the past they are now out numbered by those interested in exploitation and manipulation of suffering and justice to their own ends. It is tempting to believe that the evil in the world is too strong. Classical Paganism, in fact, threw up its hands in the face of such odds, believing it to be a natural part of existence. Schumacher, in his book, "A guide for the Perplexed," says that the two highest levels of being for us are consciousness and self-awareness. Good Socratic (pagan) ideals. He says that thought is at the conscious level and that as we enter self-awareness we become aware of the limitations of thought, opinion, and debate. We use ideas to think with but higher awareness is a waking up from thought. This way past the intellect to real insight is tempting. This is the Pagan Temptation! It may be that this concept of moving beyond thought is in fact mispercieved. I suggest that it be re-seen as an acceptance of the complexity of those things we think about. There is a way of letting go of the seeming urgency of debate over individual ideas in favor of perception of the whole alone. It is stillness, a mental act of pushing back a bit from the table of debate so that the bigger picture can be glimpsed. It is the grasping of mega-connections, super clusters, patterns and links. It is an acceptance of what is without classification, dissection, or codification. It is whole vision. Pagans used myth to capture this, and it is not surprising that our "mythless" present longs for some metaphor, ritual and symbols that express this largness beyond thought. If God is bigger than the aggregate, more complex than the most complex understanding, if we are to rise from self-awareness to God-awareness we must become more broad and curious than thoughtful and analytical. We are attempting to view the invisible, to push beyond our known field of knowledge, and attempt some perception of the emergent, fully interior Other. Jesus told the woman by the well that God calls us to worship in Spirit and in Truth. Two things that are abstract and without physicality. If Religion is Re-legio (re connection with reality, Truth, God) then it is the religious person who treads on to the thin ice of the unseen. And how, I have asked repeatedly, are we to navigate without thought, sight, and all the methods we employ to expose evil and deception. Can we trust awareness alone? Can we trust God to protect us? or is this Eastern idea, transplanted from its pagan motivation, just another deception to cause us to mire and fall? Huston Smith has noted that there is a common vision in the religions of the world that he refers to as the "forgotten truth". Non-scientific wisdom has always suggested that reality is bigger than the world of our senses, and that the higher things influence greatly the things on our plane. He goes on to explain that east and west share a common analogy, the idea of the light within. He does not, however, draw attention to an important distinction that Molnar makes: -East- The light is in everyone. We must remove the dirt and soot from our life and let it shine out of us. -West- We must allow the light into our dark room so that we may be ignited and have the divine light clear away our darkness. Paradoxically both views are right is some way. When the Christian "asks Jesus into their heart" it is an invitation into a house he himself has built and occupied continually. We are lit from birth with the flame of creation and God's omnipresence. Never the less it is our conscious invitation of Jesus into relationship with us that allows for the cleansing that so many feel upon conversion. Yet in some way the Christian life, the Religious life, is the submission to the light that has always been apart of our existence. When we give our life to God, we are seeking to not only recognize the invisible reality of things but to allow that personified reality to take control. The reconnection of our awareness with that higher reality in the form of a relationship, a friendship, is a concept as foreign to western materialism as it was to Roman materialism. Detachment is the Pagan ideal. Relationship is the Christian ideal. Questions: If all this is true, why is there not more unity among Christians? If we are really in relationship with High-reality why is there not more harmony, peace and love? And if it is because of the evil in mens hearts or because of an evil reality on a higher plane, then why has God made it so hard for us? If this plane of spirit and truth which is beyond consciousness and beyond self-awareness is so real, why are we left with so little access to it? In other words, if we are to make sense of life, if we are to reconnect with something real that is beyond what science can detect why are we not better equipped to deal with it? Is it meant to tantalize us, to stretch us beyond our natural limits, is there something in this formula and cloaking that works for our benefit in the long run? The success of modern science and materialism revolves around a central imparative: The myth of evolution and the theories of science explains everything without reference to this reality. The Pagan temptation is so compelling, in part, because it has the power of Occam's Razor behind it. Reality can nicely be explained without the need to refer to a relational deity. There is something bigger, Pagans and Christians agree, but what the bigger is, and how we are to understand it is the crux of the dispute. Molnar does not answer most of these questions, but he provides a very sure spot light on them. They are competing world views. Western Philosophy has tried in a variety of ways to integrate them for a very long time. Molnar points to some of the successful attempts. His warning is that the appeal of Myth and Pagan "feel" is so tempting, because, in the end, it is closer to meaning than rational thought can get. But if it is not informed by Christian sensibility it becomes awkwardly irrational. Molnar's careful and insightful book traces the pendulum swing between Paganism and Christianity, pointing in its guarded way, to some sort of paradoxical knowing. This signpost quality makes it my #1 choice of books. I think of it as a sort of grand point of departure, a luminous space beacon waiting for some weightless Astrothought to arrive and make the next leap for mankind. |
