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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
It's a fine Sunday morning and, instead of a mini-lecture, I thought I would share with you some ideas about postmodern understandings of the god concept. There is a long and quite different paper available on the topic if any one wants it...give me a snailmail address and it's yours. This mini-sermon comes in three parts [Kermit sometimes freezes up on me]. The first part is poetry oriented to premodern understandings of the god concept..the second, modernists' understandings and the third/fourth parts, postmodern understandings of god and religion...hope it gives you pause to think; reason to understand some of the cultural wars all around us.
****Premodern Faces of God Premodern understanding of God developed over 400k years ago; first there were spirits of nature--animals, trees, rivers and rain. Then there were ancestral gods who founded each people on earth for whom they serve as god. Then there were the earth gods--usually female embodying harvest and bounty. Around the time of Moses, earth goddesses were displaced by sky-gods which now serve as the face of god for most people in Christianity, Islam, Judaism and other 'universal' religions. Michelangelo caught the essence of the sky god, Jehovah, in his Sistine Chapel painting. The poem, below, by Alfred Noyes, catches pre-modern understanding of god concept:
In the Beginning there was nought but heaven, one majesty of light beyond all speech, beyond all thought, beyond all depth, beyond all height, Consummate heaven, the first and the last, enfolding in its perfect prime, no future rushing to the past, but one rapt Now, that knew not space or time. Formless it was, being gold on gold and void but with that complete Life where music could no wings unfold till, Lo, God smote the strings of strife. Myself unto myself am throne, myself unto myself am thrall! I that am All am all alone, He said, Yea, I have nothing, having all. And, gathering round His mount of bliss the angel squadrons of His will, He said, One battle yet there is to win, one vision to fulfill.
Given the god who creates humans to fill His life, the question becomes how humans can know the ways and will of God. There are many pathways to this knowledge...indeed, all science begins with the quest for perfect knowledge of the gods. Most pathways to knowledge required escape from the senses which were unreliable and too much of this world. The poem by Arthur Symonds catches the efforts to escape the body to find that truth:
...God, having ordained the course of star and sun, no creature hath constrained a meaner course to run, I, by his lesson taught, imaging His design have diligently wrought motion to be divine. I turn until my sense, dizzied with waves of air, spins to a point intense, and spires and centers there. There, motionless in speed, I drink that flaming peace, which in the heavens doth feed the stars with bright increase. Finally, there is the premodern understanding of what god will provide in his goodness and mercy
...Christians call it the Lord's Prayer: Our Father, which art in Heaven, give us this day out daily bread. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from all evil. Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Thou are with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me, Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.
Modernist views on the God concept vary between scorn and wondrous respect. For some, god is a primitive myth; for others, god is reduced/elevated to a clockmaker who sets a perfect world into motion only to have it rendered less than perfect by the human beings who tinker with it. As to god's plan for the universe, it is reduced to an equation which integrate the four [or five] forces in nature [weak, strong, electro-magnetism and gravity]. Those who accept the god concept see her/him/them in the beauty and elegance of eternal, unchanging laws of Nature and Society which can be known through mathematics and empirical research...thus god is found in this world rather than in a remote heaven.
Padric Colum catches the nihilistic view of the God concept:
Brute-tamer, plow-maker, earth-breaker, Can'st hear me? There are ages between us. Is it praying your are as you stand there alone in the sunset? Surely our sky-born gods have nought for you, earth-child, earth-master, earth-threat; surely your thoughts are of Pan, or Wotan or Dana. Yet why give thought to these gods, why give thought to them now? Has Pan led your brutes when they stumble?
Has Dana eased pain of birth? Did Wotan put hands on your plow? Where do your sky gods come from; from whence do your god-thoughts arise? And the thrones of the gods and their chariots and their halls, and their purples and skies? Do they come from out of your misery; from out of your pain? do they come from all of our failures? Will they come back again?
A.E. Housman adds his skepticism:
We, of a certain, are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled our hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever Brute or Blackguard made the world.
Durkheim, in his wide-sweeping genius, held that God was a categorical error: people worshipped the order and the emergent synergy of society when they worshipped their gods. Around 4000 years ago, empire began and tribal gods were obsolete; universal gods replaces them in Persia and in Rome. Most people today believe in the premodern god concept and do more, or less well with that belief to ground their lives and to help answer the four great questions of Being: Where do we come from? How shall we deal with one another; How shall we survive the terrible tragedies we each must face and...what is our future???
Modernists answer that science, rationality and close control of nature and society will suffice to those answers. Postmodernists have another answer.
Many but not all postmodern views on religion take their cue from Nietzsche and Marx. Nietzsche, in his great, sad, half-angry voice said that god was dead and that modern science had killed him. N. also said that, while god was dead, religion was not and would never die. Marx, of course, said that human beings assigned their own power for good and evil to the god concept; that religion was an ambush behind lurked the interests of the ruling classes. But Marx also said that, while religion was the sigh of an oppressed creature, it was a real sigh of distress.
In brief, postmodern understandings posit that the god concept is entirely a
human production;
that all sanctification and all profanations are human deed; that there are dramas of the
holy
most important to the human project but these, too, are human activities...more or less
well
done.
There are more affirmative postmodern understandings embodied in feminist theology, in liberation theology and in my own work which carries on from Durkheim. Durkheim had, with his sweeping genius, said that the god concept arose from a categorical error; human beings, perceiving the power of the collective, falsely called it god...that human beings are really worshipping their own society when they worship god. My own view is that there is much more to religion than either Marx or D. would accept; that human beings could not exist without the deeply inter-connected and multi-layered 'Dramas of the Holy' with which they sanctify [and profane] each other and other societies. More of my stuff later but just now, I want to close off this mini-sermon with some poetry to follow.
TR
Wm. Blake writes about the god concept in a distinctly pomo voice even if he lived and dies two centuries ago. Many know his effort to understand why a loving god would permit so much evil in the world; that is embodied in:
Tyger, tyger, burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? And what the shoulder, and what art could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet Where the hammer, where the chain and what the furnace forged thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp dare your deadly terrors grasp? When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?? Blake wrote about God as a product of human genius in these lines:
The Ancient Poets animated all objects with their genius, calling them by lovely names and adorning them with wondrous properties: woods, trees, rivers,streams, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, what ever their senses could perceive. And particularly they studied each city and people giving each a deity appropriate to its nature; 'til a system was formed... which some took advantage and enslaved the common man by separating the deity from its object; thus began the priesthood. Choosing the forms of worship from poetic tales and thus at length they pronounced that Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.
***One more excerpt from Blake then I will close with a poem by a woman whose very name is poetry.
To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love all pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight, return their thankfulness.
For Mercy has a human heart; Pity a human face and Love, a human form divine...and Peace the human dress.
***And now for Edna St. Vincent Millay:
The world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide; above the world is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land farther away on either hand; the soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.
Blake and Millay together give a very different but most affirmative view of the god concept; For Blake the god concept is a human construct and should be constructed in ways which promote the human project of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love.
For Millay, the god concept is measured in height and depth by the reach of our spiritual values and the depth of our mercy and compassion. Pre-modern, modern and postmodern concept of god are remorselessly and forever divided at the conceptual and theoretical level of human understanding. These concepts are reunited at the everyday level of human action and activity.
In brief: the pre-modern concept of god gave it human and personal if extra-ordinary powers. Watching, judging, punishing and enforcing social law was the prime activities of this god concept. The modern concept of god replaced the personal god with a remote impersonal god which was very intelligent but did not interfere into natural or social affairs. A creator who, perfect in every detail, was little more than architectural genius. The post-modern concept of god is that of a human, variable product. Each society worships itself in its god concept; each person models it after his/her own preferences; each age refits the god to legitimate whatever politics and economics are installed. Rich and powerful elites continuously refashion the god concept; poor and oppressed peoples constantly chose from a supermarket of god concepts, just that one which promises best to bring peace, justice and equity back to human affairs.
End of today's sermon....as the poet says,
Go in peace with your God. T.R.
Note: There is considerable argument about the role of poetry in sociological analysis. Many prefer an impersonal mathematical language with which to encode the indescribably rich and complex fabric of social life; others say that all science is both a poetics and a politics. I suggest we use math and poetry; each helps complement the other in the quest for human understanding.