NIETZSCHE: A HANGMAN’S METAPHYSICS

Nietzsche: sculpture by Peter Lenk
 
NIETZSCHE: POSTCARDS FROM SWISS ALPS
   
I love the great despisers,
for they are great worshipers,
arrows of longing for the other shore.

Dearest Mother: 
Yesterday I walked into a cloud 
of newly hatched ladybugs,
the air insane with red,
hundreds of tiny bodies, tick-tick,
colliding with my straw hat.
I dine at The Alpine Rose,
make compresses for my eyes
with glacier water from the lake.
As for my sleep medicine,
don’t worry, I don’t go above
50 grams of chloroform.
Please send some sausages.

Dear Friend, 
please pardon my delay
due to my landlady’s powdered face,
her sweetish odor of valerian drops.
The geraniums on her balcony
trail after me, interrupting my thoughts.
What if I asked her point-blank,
“Madam, but suppose God
is an invention of the devil?”
Philosophers are such sadists.
We who think should present ourselves
for immediate execution.

Dear Fräulein,
thank you for the kind gift
of your Memoirs of an Idealist. 
Please stop complaining
that women are slaves.
That’s what makes civilization possible.

Dear Cosima, Dear Lou,
Dear Stranger on the Train:
love was the screaming of the nightingales.
Solitude is a dawn.
In the red silence I write bitter,
I mean better —
Yet if only at the mouth of the question,
outlined with a thread of light,
stood Ariadne —

Respected Colleagues and Illustrious Dead:
I want back
the coin under your tongue.
I climbed as high as I could.
On the ledge of heaven I saw
a swift’s nest, festooned with droppings.

Dear Sister: are we not
the fools of a dead god?
Through granite 
swirls of birth I shout:
There is no truth,
only perspectives,
the sacred word
is perhaps –
 
Dearest Sister:
are we not happy

~ Oriana © 2014

**

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth” and, even more so, “To kindle lightning, one must for a long time be a cloud” — and, of course, the most famous: “One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star” — these aphorisms seem to glorify inner turbulence. But is “Dionysian philosophy” of passion and transience a contradiction in terms? Isn’t a philosopher a calm, resigned man? One who cultivates restraint, and not a wild mustache?

Wait. Let me not get Dionysian right away. My plan is to deliver the essay about Hangman’s Metaphysics first, and shamelessly indulge in Dionysian-Nietzschean intoxications later. Nietzsche teaches one to think in terms of no guilt, no punishment — self-trust. This time my self-trust counsels me to be coherent first.

THE GOD OF PUNISHMENT

By not rejecting the Old Testament, Christianity had to absorb an angry and cruel god (all ancient gods were cruel; mercy is fairly recent development). It was a tribal god, nameless and faceless (Moses was once allowed to see his backside) — a god of wrath who tried to drown the earth in a flood because he regretted the mistake of creation; in the main, a god of vengeance and punishment (GOP = "God of Punishment"). Joyce called him the Hangman God. He was probably inspired by Nietzsche’s “Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics.” Let me quote a bit from “Twilight of the Idols”:

“We no longer have any sympathy today with the concept of “free will.” We know only too well what it is—the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind “accountable” in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him. . .  The doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, of finding guilty. The entire old-style psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves THE RIGHT TO PUNISH—or wanted to create this right for God . . . MEN WERE CONSIDERED "FREE" SO THAT THEY MIGHT BE JUDGED AND PUNISHED — so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (whereby the most fundamental falsification was made into the very principle of psychology).”

Nietzsche argues that MOST COMMANDMENTS WERE MADE NOT TO BE OBEYED, BUT TO BE BROKEN, CREATING GUILT. Religion creates and exploits guilt. “Brothels were built with the bricks of religion,” William Blake observed. Some religious rules are so contrary to human psychology that they are virtually impossible to follow. Don’t even think about sex, young man! If you ever lust after a woman, it’s the same as committing adultery. Young woman, keep yourself pure. Don’t covet that pretty dress, much less fantasize about the Prince, you vile temptress under the curse of Eve!

Such commandments were made to be broken, so that people would feel perpetually guilty and deserving of punishment. It wasn’t just people’s actions that god spied on, but even more so their thoughts. One of the first ideas taught to children is that god can read their thoughts. No use hiding under the bed or in a closet; you are under constant surveillance. And whose thoughts can be always pure and holy? We know we have trespassed, and thus we feel constantly guilty.

“Religion is in the guilt-producing control business,” as Bishop Spong put it. It’s about controlling people. It keeps the poor from murdering the rich, as Napoleon shrewdly observed.  But Nietzsche is not interested in the social function of religion, but rather in its impact on the individual psyche. In Nietzsche’s eyes religion was anti-life; Christianity was a religion of death. “God degenerated to the contradiction of life instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes” (The Anti-Christ).

Ideally there’d be no guilt and no punishment, no gulf between man and a non-judging, all-accepting deity. Christianity took a step toward that radical doctrine, but quickly drew back. The god of punishment ruled more absolutely than ever, the vengeance complete with the doctrine of eternal damnation.

Here is Bishop Spong’s wonderful video on the invention of hell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF6I5VSZVqc

If god is dead, what about the fate of the immortal soul? Here is Nietzsche’s answer: ”The concepts “soul”, “spirit” and last of all the concept “immortal soul” were invented in order to despise the body, in order to make it sick — “holy” — in order to cultivate an attitude of appalling disrespect for all things in life which deserve to be treated seriously.” (Ecce Homo)

DO WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PUNISH OUR PEERS?

Nietzsche on punishment: “A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does.” (The Dawn)

Soon after my twentieth birthday, I had an insight that we have no right to punish others. It was an intuition that simply occurred to me, rather than something I reasoned out. And I didn’t mean criminal justice — obviously a serial killer should be locked up for the sake of public safety. Children — no corporal punishment, but “time out” seemed acceptable. My “no punishment” intuition concerned adults, and particularly relationship partners. What right do we have to set ourselves up as judge and executioner, and try to punish them for doing or saying something that displeases us? Do we ever have the right to be nasty in revenge for it?

By “punishment” I mean sarcastic remarks or other verbal abuse, or “the silent treatment,” or refusal of physical affection. “We don’t have the right to punish” occurred to me long before I read “heaven is a place where everyone is kind,” or essays on how we are moving away from an honor-and -vengeance based social code to a dignity-based code. I didn’t have a fully worked-out explanation, but somehow I managed to realize that we have to break the chain of unkindness leading to more unkindness — even if we feel “provoked.” 

It is unfortunate that Nietzsche became so famous for having said “god is dead.” For the broader public, this eclipsed everything else he said. His views on free will, guilt, and punishment are hardly known at all — a great loss, since this is one of the crucial issues of our time.


BUT WHAT ABOUT . . . REWARD?

But if the most radical message of the gospels is non-punishment or non-revenge, what about — reward? According to Nietzsche, the psychology of the gospels is not about punishment and reward. If we must use think in terms of "reward," then the reward for the no-punishment attitude is the kingdom of heaven not in the afterlife, but right now: “the kingdom of heaven is within you.”  

By abolishing punishment, we abolish the gulf between the human and the divine, thus entering “the kingdom.” Or, to secularize the language, by abolishing punishment, we abolish the gulf between the flawed, vengeful humanity and the more loving and compassionate humanity, thus entering heaven, a place where everyone is kind. Heaven is a state of mind; or, to use Nietzsche’s language, “a condition of the heart.” 

(True, scholars have come to question the "within you" translation, saying that it should be: The kingdom is among you — it refers to the person of the Messiah. The Messiah is already among you. But if so, then it ceases to be of interest to me. But I'm among those who claim the right to choose those stories, sayings, and interpretations that we find inspiring — that help us live. The scriptures are always read selectively, regardless. We might as well choose the best parts.)

Likewise, it’s imperative to be selective when it comes to Nietzsche; we must be careful to absorb only his best, and not, for instance, his contempt for the “herd.” I think “a hangman’s metaphysics” — the idea that religious rules were imposed not to be followed, but broken, thus making everyone feel guilty and living in dread of punishment — belongs among his most brilliant insights.  

“The greatest ideas are the greatest events,” Nietzsche claimed. To a lover of ideas, that is self-evident. There is a great idea buried in Christianity, and that is the idea of non-punishment. That idea was too radical not only for its time; it is too radical in our times as well, except for all but a handful of intellectuals who debate the existence of free will — a concept invented by priests to justify punishment. In Nietzsche’s words, “Religions are at bottom systems of cruelty.”
 

Sils-Maria, photo by Ivan Pastoukhov

**

AN ACTUAL POSTCARD FROM SWISS ALPS
 
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, from a postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria, 30 July 1881

(And my mother used to criticize me for writing overly long and complex postcards — but a postcard from Nietzsche, now THAT was a postcard!)

Overbeck was a German theologian and Nietzsche’s most loyal friend. Overbeck’s most important work is “How Christian is Our Present-Day Theology?” He argued that Christian theology, both the dogmatic and the liberal kind, had basically nothing to do with the radical ideas of Christ.

Indeed we can trace the beginnings of the death of god to medieval theologians, who argued that even god was subject to the laws of necessity and a priori concepts such as mathematics. The scholastic meditations on questions like, “Could god choose to do evil?” or “To whom was the ‘bloody ransom’ of the sacrifice on the cross paid?” —  such questioning undermined the concept of omnipotence and benevolence, and paved the way for the rationalistic biblical scholarship that, like Enlightenment before it, concluded that far from being the inerrant word of god, the bible was written by men.

 A view of the Upper Egandine, Switzerland. Sils is the lake farthest in the distance.

WHAT, NO FREE WILL?

Nietzsche was elated to discover that Spinoza did not believe in free will. God and nature were one, and mind and the body were two aspects of the same substance. Human beings, being a part of nature, are subject to the laws of necessity. Nietzsche introduces more complexity: in spite of being ruled by nature and causes of which he is not conscious, man wants to affirm himself, to feel that he is a powerful agent. “The first result of happiness is a sense of power,” Nietzsche asserts in Dawn. On the subjective level, a human being has no choice except to see himself as an agent, a doer who deliberately chooses one thing and not another. (As more than one person quipped, “I believe in free will. I have no choice but to believe in it.”)

And yet: “Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything "arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax — in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them” (Beyond Good and Evil). To put it simply, artists know that their best work arises from the unconscious.

“If ever I played dice with the gods at the divine table of the earth” — But here the poet is at play, not the philosopher. Ultimately Nietzsche is only struggling toward the understanding of the subjective experience of will. The foundations of the scientific worldview are not yet in place. The closest thing to determinism is the idea of “god’s plan” — forever causing confusion about predestination versus free will and thus guilt — “a hangman’s metaphysics” indeed!

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes down from the mountains to correct the concept of duality. Good and evil are intertwined, as well as freedom and necessity — artists learn that by experiencing the creative process. But then everything is intertwined. In Zarathustra’s words “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored . . . ”

*

THE DOG WHO’S KNOWN NOTHING BUT LOVE

Not long ago in a park-like area where I tend to meet the neighborhood dog walkers, I met
Kayli, a beautiful German shepherd. I love the breed, and I also know a German shepherd is not a spaniel that you can start petting right away. But Kayli wanted to be petted practically right away. In fact pretty soon she was lying on her side, asking for her belly to be scratched. I was somewhat taken aback. German shepherds are police dogs and military dogs, and intelligence is only one reason they are chosen for such work. They are still close to the wolf, and when they attack, they are ferocious. Though exceptionally beautiful, they are also the “intimidator dog.” And here was Kayli on her back, asking to have her belly scratched by a stranger. I couldn’t imagine trying to train Kayli not to fawn on the terrorist suspect — sure, it could be done, but who’d want to?

And then I thought: “All this dog has ever known is love.”

Shouldn’t Christianity be about love rather than sin and guilt? A child who gets a lot of love grows up into a different adult than a child who’s constantly shamed and made to feel guilty. That great experiment is actually being performed; child rearing has become less and less harsh. This is particularly true of children of professionals, who strike observers as brighter, happier, and more affectionate than children in previous generations. When these children grow up, we can already guess that war and violence will have little appeal to them.

They are growing up without the nonstop surveillance of an omnipresent “eye in the sky” and the constant guilt induced by toxic religions. It’s hard to exaggerate the benefits of being treated with respect and love ever since you can remember. This is the basis of lifelong emotional security.

I asked myself: What if Nietzsche had known nothing but love and respect (it’s not that his mother wasn’t loving, but let’s not forget that he attended German schools at a time when adults believed children needed to be dominated into the ground)? In addition, what if he knew Zen and Daoism and got to practice serenity? What if he didn’t suffer as much as he did — would we then ever have The Birth of Tragedy? I wouldn't in the least mind the loss of Zarathustra, but I’d want The Birth of Tragedy at any cost. Lest we continue in rationalist slumbers, someone had to remind us that the word “tragedy” derives from tragos, he-goat. (But maybe life inevitably delivers sufficient hardship, without the need for people to torment one another.)

 

 A mask of Dionysus, Myrina, 2nd century BCE
 
But I’ve been changing my mind about the necessity of torment for creativity. Does it take an inner emotional storm to render passion on the page? Art requires distance — on that point all agree. Wordsworth said that art is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Philosophy should be tranquil — we take that for granted. But the invigorating energy in Nietzsche’s writing — could it have been born of tranquillity? Would his quarrel with Christianity been as intense?

“Emerson and Goethe were serene, almost as though they lacked superegos,” Harold Bloom states in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? The superego is the internalized punitive parent, the angry father, identified by some with conscience. But it’s the collective angry father, including social norms, peer pressure, and of course religion.

What happens if the parents are predominantly loving and the child grows up feeling secure rather than fearful? We’d expect this loved child to have an inner supportive parent and become a slow-to-anger, serene adult. Ah, the cheerful serenity that permeates much of classical art, the joyfulness that is supposed to be the daughter of Elysium and the essence of the immortals. Some might object that a serene person can’t be creative since art is trauma-driven. But does art have to be trauma-driven? Could anyone find Goethe or Emerson insufficiently creative? Or Goethe, in spite of his later rejection of Romanticism, incapable of rendering mystery, storm, and passion?

*

Continuing with Bloom, I came upon this:

~ Goethe was an instinctive pagan, believing in his own daemonic endowment and spontaneously manifesting the “joyful wisdom” that Nietzsche so desperately sought to attain . . . Originally a Unitarian minister, Emerson abandoned his post  because he knew only the God within, which he defined as the best and oldest part of his self. . . . I enjoy the thought of Eliot reading my favorite sentence in the essay “Self-Reliance”:

‘As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.  

~ Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

*

The middle of the nineteenth century was by no means a time of tolerance. True, Darwin’s The Origin of Species (an act of intellectual courage on the order of Copernicus and Galileo — though Darwin did not have to fear for his life) was published in 1859, but it would be decades before its ideas became widely known and become a cornerstone of the scientific worldview that made a Creator unnecessary, an archaic relic. Emerson did not dispense with a Creator, but posited a “god within.” I think it was extremely brave of him to call prayers a disease of the will and religions a disease of the intellect. This meant that no university would employ him, but then, unlike Nietzsche, Emerson did not care to be a professor. His eloquence brought him a wide audience, his lectures and books supplying him with a secure income.

And it was also brave for Emily Brontë, a parson’s daughter, to write this stanza in “No Coward Soul Is Mine,” her most famous poem, one of the finest in the English language

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

(For more on Brontë and Emerson, please go to

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/09/no-coward-soul-is-mine.html)

To call organized religions “worthless as withered weeds” was at least as radical then as it is now (not in contemporary Europe, but here in the US; the US is an anomaly in the developed world, being close to Mexico in religiosity). Of course Blake also had a rather Gnostic personal system, influenced by Swedenborg, whose concept of god was highly idiosyncratic and his theology unorthodox (e.g. he believed the Last Judgment had already taken place).

And what about Spinoza’s pantheism and his claim that the soul dies with the body? Yes, there were precursors . . .  Nietzsche wasn’t even the first one to say that god was dead — Hegel used the phrase in his works several times. But who reads Hegel? Nietzsche was the one who announced the death of god as the “greatest event of our times.” Churches and cathedrals — those were now the great tombs of a dead god.

Nietzsche knew that the news of god’s death would take a while to make itself fully known: “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.— And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!” (Joyful Wisdom)
 
Nietzsche and Marx as the killers of god
 
(A shameless digression: The missing figure among these “god killers” is of course Freud, who saw religion as an infantile projection of a parent in the sky.)

André Malraux said that the twentieth century century would belong either to Marx or Nietzsche. Marx prevailed, though he’d be horrified by Stalin’s Soviet Union and communism as the state religion. (By the way, did anyone notice that Putin starts his speeches by addressing his audience as “comrades”? The imperialist-communist dream is not over as long as Putin is in power.

While the omission of Freud is ridiculous, many might also see Darwin as belonging here. Darwin was the most reluctant of god's assassins. He was concerned about his wife Emma, who was devout. Could she live on if told that Adam and Eve were a myth? The 19th century, so astonishingly daring in many ways, also gave us the fragile "lady" who shouldn't roam too far from her fainting sofa.)
 

*

The recent progress in secularization would be incomplete without stating that some of the clergy no longer believe in god. Already in 1993, an article in The Independent yielded this juicy quotation about the Episcopalian non-belief:

'In the good old days (about ten years ago) it was enough to run off with a choirboy or the organist's wife to be unfrocked. But, having dismantled the liturgy of Cranmer, the [Anglican] Church is now so lazy about language that it allows blatant confusion between doubt (which any reasonable person experiences) and disbelief. So any friendly atheist who is above moral suspicion is welcome to stay on board and receive a salary and accommodation to the value of £20,000 a year’.

And I have personally met rabbis and liberal Protestant ministers who either openly admitted to agnosticism, or adopted Rabbi Kushner’s definition of god as a sum of human ideals. As for the Catholic left, it has embraced doubt. Doubt is no longer a sin; it is now officially a part of faith. As Catholicism goes, that is huge progress. The church is living dangerously!

*

This morning I pondered the name Yahweh: what an alien sound, how obviously an imported god! No wonder the generic names for “god” are preferred. In Hebrew, that name was EL (recognizable in Elohim). After all, it’s Isra-EL, and not Isra-yahweh. (Yes, of course I know that it was forbidden to pronounce Yah’s name, but I suspect there were reasons for this prohibition beyond mere “respect.”)

I checked Wikipedia: “The origins of the god [Yahweh] are unclear: an influential suggestion, although not universally accepted, is that the name originally formed part of a title of the Canaanite supreme deity El, el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched out beside the earthly armies of Israel; the alternative proposal connects it with a place-name south of Canaan mentioned in Egyptian records from the Late Bronze Age.”

What an image! Yahweh as the warrior god who leads the heavenly army marching beside the army of Israel! No wonder the name Yahweh is no longer used; that tribal god is truly dead, the pronunciation of that name forbidden so successfully that it got lost with the loss of the vowels. We are listening to the last echoes of the hollow gong. Even the Jehovah of Jehovah’s Witnesses is not the Bronze Age god.

ETERNAL VITALITY

What is of genuine importance is eternal vitality, not eternal life. ~ Nietzsche

To Nietzsche, what matters is not the eternal boredom of the feeble Christian heaven, but “living dangerously” (in Nietzsche’s case, it was rather the matter of thinking dangerously). “Eternal vitality” instantly reminded me of Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight.” And somehow that energy finds a venue for itself, the ideas and new areas of growth. It goes both ways: when a goal seizes the imagination, the energy will be found; and when energy is abundant, a goal will be found. Like a mountain river, the eternal vitality rushes on.

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendor . . .
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

~ Shelley, “Mont Blanc”



I started living when I fully and absolutely realized that there is a deadline. Only then I realized that I can choose to cope, or I can choose to "practice falling apart." Likewise, I can choose to be generous and adorable, or grumpy and miserable. But I won't cease to be outspoken for the sake of being adorable. It's enough that my friends and neighbors like me, and most people I interact with. The message "I value you as a human being" is included even in a brief chat.

Nietzsche was known as a kind man of impeccable manners. In his writings, alas, he shows himself filled with contempt for the great majority of humanity, the “herd.” This is a trap into which an intellectual can easily fall, especially if he is isolated from his peers: “I am separate, different, and superior.” Among philosophers, only Plato seems to have understood the value of kindness instead of judging and punishment. That’s the famous, Be kind

But Nietzsche understood at least in flashes the price for being judgmental:

"If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice: a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love.” (The Joyful Wisdom)

It was the commandment to love god that caused me the most distress. I would go as far as to say that if we’d been given the freedom to hate god (to me god = Yahweh, god the father, the boss with real power; the son seemed subordinate), or at least not been coerced into pretending to love him, then who knows, I might have developed some affection for the lonely guy in the sky (I saw him as an “old bachelor,” a European label for an eccentric never-married man). True, vengeful and narcissistic, but I imagined he suffered too — not out of compassion, no, but due to isolation and boredom. The constant praises of angels sounded hellishly boring to me. “How can he stand it?” I asked myself when I was still a child, trying to imagine heaven: nothing but clouds and angels and the souls of the dead, all singing hymns 24/7. No respite for the night, since heaven was constant daylight. 

JUNG ON THE “CATACLYSMIC SHIFT”

Jung observed that “A cataclysmic spiritual shift had taken place, largely missed by the theologians, a shift from the God above to the God below [i.e. in the unconscious], from communal liturgy to private communion, from ritual observance to EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE (emphasis mine), from dogma to myth, from religion to psychology, from the conscious to the unconscious.” (Paul Stern, C.G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, p. 253)

But that had been already said by Emily Brontë in her famous poem, “No Coward Soul Is Mine.” She was dismissing all religions as “worthlesss as withered weeds” and affirming the “god within.” But poetry is not taken seriously. Milosz also speaks of this shift, along with the disappearance of heaven and hell, as the greatest event of modern times.

I suspect it will take a few more decades before the full extent of the “cataclysmic event” is known. As Ginette Paris observed, “It’s still early after the death of god.”

THE MEANING OF “OVERMAN”:

According to Friedman in The Disappearance of God, the overman is not an individual or an ethnic group. It’s the collective human potential. It’s the ideal future humanity. The term expresses “a yearning to yield something happier, nobler, and wiser than ourselves.” (It’s instructive here to recall the Superior Man in Dao de Jing.

The attainment of this potential is tied to the death of god. It’s only after religion decays that humans can experience richer development, free from imaginary guilt. To repeat once more: the rules were meant to be broken, so that we’d feel guilty. In The Antichrist Nietzsche says: “The very word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”

What can this richer development lead to? Zarathustra declares: “I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth . . . Once the sin against God was the greatest sin, but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.”

This should not be taken as Nietzsche’s precocious environmentalism. “The earth” stands here for this earth, this life — this one and only life need not be a “vale of tears”; it can be a joy; it can be magnificent. Once, blasphemy and failure to pray and attend worship services were major sins. With the death of god these become irrelevant, ludicrous even. What matters is the growing human cooperation and the extension of human rights so that one small group doesn’t fatten off the exploitation of others. We may be still a long way from reaching this ideal, but at least there is an awareness of it.

Rilke stated that we were “building god.” Nietzsche saw the task as building humanity. Dostoyevski warned that man wants to become god, and the result can only be disastrous. In terms of the “new Soviet man,” Dostoyevski was right. But now globalization and the Internet are opening new perspectives. Nietzsche, that misunderstood anti-nihilist, that glorifier of humanity as it should become, really thought that we must become gods. Or, at the very least, move beyond the old heaven-and-hell mentality toward a full embrace of this life and this beautiful world.

“This I teach men: no longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly things, but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth.” “Evil I call it, and misanthropic – all this teaching of the One and the Plenum and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Permanent. All the permanent – that is only a parable. And the poets lie too much.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Upon The Blessed Isles)

 


FREE WILL IS NOT AS IMPORTANT OR AS INTERESTING AS WHAT THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS PRODUCES

Charles:

This blog has more information than a good sized book.

My favorites quotes: "True, this is a very selective reading of the New Testament. But the scriptures are always read selectively, regardless. We may as well choose the best parts."

“I believe in free will. I have no choice but to believe in it.”
But free will is not as important or as interesting as what the unconsciousness produces.

"Doubt is no longer a sin; it is now officially a part of faith.”

Of course my favorite section is the one about Kayli. I love that you said this dog has known only love.

Oriana:

Creative people definitely learn about the importance of not interfering with the creative process, which is unconscious. The unconscious is the source of interesting, often surprising ideas or images. “Free will” is indeed not relevant here. That’s an excellent observation.

Darlene:

His atheism aside, I can easily see Nietzsche as a Christian writer trying to restore Jesus' ideas about no judgment and no punishment.

Oriana:

I agree. It’s just that he could see that god was dead, and he became the great announcer of the death of god. It was too late: Darwin’s theory of evolution was becoming known, and the geologists had established that the earth was much much older than 6,000 years. Nietzsche said that there was no longer any need to debate the existence of god. It was sufficient just to trace the evolution of the construct of god.

But Hangman’s Metaphysics can easily be seen as a radical critique of organized Christianity from the point of view of the revolutionary ideas of Jesus —  instead of punishment, forgiveness; the kingdom of heaven is within — a blissful and loving state of mind.

I think people are beginning to take more interest in the idea of no punishment. For one thing we are aware that violence is often associated with having been abused as a child. More cruelty toward a prisoner will not rehabilitate him. But letting him work with animals just might work, providing unconditional love. 


Darlene, you’ve hit on something huge here: the essence of Christianity. Now, when you ask people about the central message of Christianity, Protestants may say that we get to heaven by grace and not by deeds, but others (including the more liberal Protestants) will say the central message is compassion and forgiveness. If you equate that with “non-punishment,” then Nietzsche can indeed be regarded as a more Christian thinker than a lot of fundamentalists, for instance, who seem so preoccupied with who will burn in hell forever. Nietzsche as a radical Christian — there is something to be said for it. And hell, being a cruel and unusual punishment and the opposite of compassion and forgiveness, is the most anti-Christian concept there is.

Now if only god would exist . . .  

NO COWARD SOUL IS MINE

Lvov: Polish graves. Photo: Jan Pieklo.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.

 I. EMILY BRONTË’S “GOD WITHIN MY BREAST”

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life -- that in me has rest,
As I -- undying Life -- have power in thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou -- THOU art Being and Breath,
And what THOU art may never be destroyed.

~ Emily Brontë, 1846

This poem, widely regarded as one of the finest in the English language, has always astonished me. That a parson’s daughter could so fearlessly and absolutely dismiss organized religion was already amazing:

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

~ this is not Christopher Hitchens, this is Emily Brontë, a clergyman’s daughter, dismissing all creeds as vain and worthless. The true god was the “god within [her] breast.” I wonder what her father thought of this poem. It’s possible that he agreed, but he had his “pastoral duties” to perform, and wasn’t about to tell his “flock” (it’s interesting that the faithful didn’t object to being called sheep) that their creed was “worthless as withered weeds.”

Another astonishing thing is the cosmic sweep of the poem. Long before astrophysicists started speculating about the “multiverse,” consisting of many universes, this 28-year-old daughter of an obscure Yorkshire parson uses the plural, universes:

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.

~ this is stated in terms that in no way allude to the Last Judgment or anything that might relate to Judeo-Christian concepts of the end of the world. It’s closer to the notion of Akashic Records (from Sanscrit akasha, space) -- a non-physical repository of all knowledge, nowadays analogized to a “cosmic super-computer.” Milosz, devastated by all the destruction he'd witnessed during the war, also yearned for that kind of cosmic storage where everything -- absolutely everything, down to every insect and blade of grass -- would have eternal existence.

Of course I’m not suggesting that Emily Brontë had any knowledge of modern astrophysics or computers. What she could imagine was a cosmic being who was the “real god” (for lack of a better term) and not a human invention, one of the multitude of gods created and worshipped by humanity, a petty sky god presiding over the earth rather than the multiverse. That "real god" was more like the "Hidden Power" that Shelley and Wordworth saw, governing both nature and the human mind. And let us not forget Coleridge's idea that we are all Aeolian harps "diversely framed," the music of humanity depending on how the Hidden Power, like the wind, happened to sweep across our . . . ahem, strings of the heart? Let's just say the mind. It's too early yet for neuroscience.

Like the great Romantics, Brontë comes across as a mystic. She has her personal faith, her “God within my breast.” Social convention forced her to attend church service, but, as the “creeds/weeds” rhyme suggests, her true worship was a solitary communion. She probably experienced it most during her long walks on the moors. A neighbor recalled seeing Emily return from her walk, her face “lit up by a divine light.”

Emily Brontë is one of the most puzzling figures in literary history. She left us a magnificent poem about her imaginary Beloved. She died at thirty. It’s possible that she had Asperger’s syndrome. She had no friends; there is no evidence of her ever having been in love. 

EMERSON’S GOD AS HIGHEST SELF

Harold Bloom, in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, says that this is his favorite sentence in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”:

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

Just as it’s startling that a parson’s daughter would dismiss all creeds, so it is at least somewhat surprising that a former minister would call religion “a disease of the intellect.” Given the American religiosity, it is a shock. But then Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, in spite of belonging to the nineteenth-century, still shock today’s readers.

Emerson left the ministry because he could not accept the conventional beliefs. Like Emily Brontë, he believed in the “god within,” who was also his highest self. Bloom quotes Emerson:

That is always best which me me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, obey thyself. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being.
 
(I had to look up the meaning of “wen.” It’s a “sebaceous cyst,” or a plugged up oil gland. Imagine comparing yourself to a wart and a cyst!)

In an unpublished early poem (or a poem of sorts), again quoted by Bloom, Emerson says,

I find [God] in the bottom of my heart
I hear continually his Voice therein
And books and priests and worlds I less esteem.
Who says the heart’s a blind guide? It is not.
My heart did never counsel me to sin . . .
The little needle always knows the north.

This is wonderful self-trust, or call it self-reliance: “The little needle always knows the north.” It reminds me of a sign on a T shirt: “God yes, church no.” It seems that people increasingly want a personal god, not the official one; they don’t want to be told what they should believe.

Emerson believed in self-creation, which reminds me of my own Kabala-inspired poem, “The Twenty-Second Name of God”:

God breaks our hearts
so we can create ourselves.

It also reminds me of Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Hirsch’s under-appreciated volume On Love:

Love is a bright foreigner, a foreign self
that must recognize me for what I truly am;
only my lover can understand me as I am
when I am struggling to create myself.

Emerson could also be called a “process theologian.” “God is, not was.” Conventional Christianity, Emerson observes, “proceeds as if God were dead.” He also famously said, “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” Sounding very much like Nietzsche, he summons us to greatness when he laments, “Man is the dwarf of himself.”

Nietzsche could also be called a prophet of self-reliance, and his rejection of religion was the most extreme: “All religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties.” 


EMERSON AND JESUS WALK INTO A BAR WITH SOMEONE WHO LOOKS LIKE YOU 
 
[I have asked Professor John Guzlowski to comment on the Emerson section. He also composed the heading of this section.]

John Guzlowski:

It’s hard to get to the core of Emerson on any of his ideas but I think you can make a start at getting at what he thinks about self-reliance and religion and the spiritual within the self by tracking what he says about Jesus in his Divinity School Address (the speech that got him into a lot of trouble).

There are about a half dozen references to Jesus, and they suggest that Jesus is a man who embodies in himself the sense that he is divine and that he should display this divinity by sharing it with others who have basically forgotten that they contain sparks of the universal divinity.

Here’s the one central paragraph I think in the Divinity School Address that embodies this idea and talks about how Christianity has betrayed it.  (By the way, when Emerson refers in this paragraph to the Reason he means the sort of intuitive/spiritual sense of things that we associate with the Romantic impulse. The Understanding is its opposite):

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think." 

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man." The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

Oriana:

This is so enlightening: the roots of Whitman’s ideas about being divine (“Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from. The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer”). Of course he saw others as divine as well, which leads to an egalitarian attitude. 

What Emerson says reminds me of “Tat tvam asi”: You are that. According to a Hindu tradition, our deepest self is god, who is experiencing himself/herself by assuming human disguises. 

And of course Jesus said, “The Kingdom of heaven is within you.”

Not counting New Age fans, I think the modern secular stance is on the whole rather different from the "god within."Most of my friends say they believe that "there is something out there." If so, then it (“it” seems the most fitting pronoun) is a cosmic deity or force or energy, completely unlike humans, and not concerned about humans (though perhaps we are connected to this energy through some quantum entanglement). This is pretty much what the Founding Fathers and other Enlightenment thinkers believed: god created the world and then left it alone. God would never violate the laws of nature. 

(Speaking of being connected to some sort of cosmic energy, Emerson speaks of needing to be like those circus acrobats who can ride two horses at once, standing with one foot on each. We need to be present in our daily reality, but also gave at the universe and have a cosmic perspective.)

WALLACE STEVEN'S "LESS AND LESS HUMAN" (PLATO'S GHOST)

Wallace Stevens has poems about the impersonal god (if there must be a god to begin with). Let me quote from “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”:

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly . . .

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak


*
 
And yes, I can see how Emerson’s Divinity speech could get him into huge trouble. Are our times an improvement when we consider that a minister preaching this would get death threats from fundamentalists? Maybe using "Mythus" rather than "Myth" would protect him, but I guess the first sentence which calls Jesus a prophet rather than the Divine Savior would be enough for those who put their passion into signs like "Accept Jesus or burn in hell."

Of course Christianity is mythology, precariously affixed on top of the Judaic mythology. Once I grasped that, I reached the point of no return. It wasn't that much about science: I could see ways to reconcile Darwin with creationism. It wasn't the problem of evil: the Catholic explanation in terms of free will is quite appealing, if we don't insist that a horrible atrocity like the Holocaust (I mean the more general term, beyond the Jewish Holocaust) would merit an exception and some action. But once I saw the Judaic deity as a tribal god of thunder, pretty much equivalent to Zeus and Wotan, and also knew that there were other death-and-resurrection stories in other mythologies, that was it.

As I explain later, in my reply to Hyacinth, in the past great thinkers such as Dante and Milton accepted classical mythology as real; it was just that now the worship of the old gods was forbidden. I wonder if they had at least some vague notion of how dangerous it is to dismiss any mythology as not literally true. If one mythology can be dismissed as "not true," what's there to stop the downfall of all mythologies (not as profound literature to be understood metaphorically, but as literal truth)?

To question the literal truth of one mythology is to question all mythologies. And let me quote Joseph Campbell here: What is mythology? - Other people's religion. ~ What is religion? - Our own mythology. 

I suspect the word "Understanding" is a clumsy translation from German. It should be intuition vs the rational mind (not that intuition is irrational; that's a misunderstanding of how the brain works "behind the scenes").
 

THE “TRUE GOD” OF THE GNOSTICS

I recalled Brontë’s poem after reading the interview with Stephen Mitchell, the celebrated translator of Rilke as well as Genesis, the Psalms, and Tao Te Ching. The god of Genesis, Mitchell concludes, is a human invention and not the real god, who corresponds more to the Tao. I also recalled that the Gnostics did not regard Yahweh as the true god, but only as a demiurge, a “half-maker,” who made a flawed world and arrogantly demanded that only he be worshipped. Christ, however, was a messenger from the true god, the ultimate source of being, also known as Pleroma (fullness) and Bythos (depth).

Gnosticism did not speak of salvation from sin, but of release from ignorance. Christ did not die for our sins; he came to impart knowledge of the true god (it is striking that he keeps calling god “father”; heretofore the deity was never called father, but rather “the Lord”). Deep understanding of the Love Commandment and communion with the “god within” make sinning virtually impossible: that’s why the Love Commandment supersedes a multitude of religious regulations. The Christian Gnostics rejected the Old Testament.

But Gnosticism has its unpleasant aspects as well. It’s quite hierarchical. A small minority of people are the Pneumatics, the “spiritual.” They possess Gnosis and are ready for paradise. Most people, however, are the Hyletics: they are materialistic and superficial. Finally, there are the Psychics -- those who live largely in their psyche. If the Psychics are open to the message from a messenger of light, they can undergo a transformation that makes them ready for paradise. In fact, according to Gnosticism, each person has the proverbial “divine spark” in them and an “angelic twin,” or higher self, waiting for a reunion.

This sounds pretty much like standard New Age lore; the trouble starts when we start reading about the Gnostic contempt for the world and the body. Since the body is evil, sex is of course evil, creating more bodies. The world is a prison and the body is a prison of the soul.

Some writers disagree and claim that the Gnostics believed that sex was a sacrament. To be sure, there were various schools of Gnosticism, but given the foundational belief that the world was created by not by the true god but by a morally deficient demiurge, rejection of the world, body, and sex makes sense. This is also the typical tendency of all major religions. The spirit is good, matter is bad. Celibacy is a hard sell these days, so New Age writers try to slant Gnosticism toward the Tantra.

In my eyes, the most attractive quality of Gnosticism is its rejection of blood sacrifice as necessary for entry to paradise, and its more sophisticated emphasis not on sin and the need for salvation, but on release from ignorance. 

One who knows, who has access to the “god within,” is not interested in doing evil. This contrasts with the Catholic obsession with sin and human depravity. There is more paradise in Gnosticism, more emphasis on “the god within” (“The kingdom of God is within you”). Communion with the inner god seems to indicate that paradise is available now, and not necessarily only after death. Maybe that’s why Emily Brontë’s face looked to her neighbor “as if lit by a divine light.”

Much of this sounds good and “spiritually correct.” Its harmony with New Age beliefs likely accounts for the current rise of interest in Gnosticism. In place of the toxic, vengeful god of fundamentalist Christianity, we get an all-embracing cosmic god who is also the “god within my breast.” Nevertheless, we must not forget that the Gnostics did not regard Yahweh as a human invention. For Gnostics, Yahweh did exist and did create the world -- it’s just that he was a deficient deity, a “half-maker.” He was not a false, invented god; he was just the wrong god, not worthy of worship.

ALEKSANDER WAT’S GOD BEYOND HISTORY

The true god of the Gnostics does not suffer. It (this seems to be the most fitting pronoun) dwells apart, happy and serene. And that in turn reminds me of the mystical experience that a fascinating Polish poet (a dadaist in his youth) and writer, Aleksander Wat, had in a Soviet prison in Saratov, in the south of Russia on the Volga (after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, at Stalin's order the so-called Volga Germans were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan).

Wat came down with dysentery and was running a high fever. One night, when a patrol boat on the Volga sailed back and forth, sounding the anti-aircraft alarm, Wat couldn’t sleep. Feverish and half-starved, he had a vision:

I heard laughter, a flourish of laughter that kept approaching and receding. A vulgar laugh, actually. I didn’t like opera, but my brothers and sisters did. And so I had seen Faust as a child and I knew Mephistopheles’ laugh from it. It came in flourishes. Ha haha ha! Ha haha ha! It kept receding and approaching. It was then that I had a vision of the devil. I won’t even try to reconstruct that night because I wouldn’t succeed. But it was then that the breakthrough occurred. Evidently, there had been something missing. There had been some obstacle, some last partition, and then it broke with that laughter of the vulgar, the most vulgar devil of all, flourishes of vulgar laughter that kept approaching, then receding far away fora long time, a very long time. I saw the devil. Well, I saw a devil with hooves, the devil from the opera. I really did see him -- it must have been a hallucination from hunger, but not only did I see him, but I could almost smell the brimstone. My mind was working at terribly high revolutions. It was the devil in history.

And I felt something else, that the majesty of God was spread over history, over all this, a God distant but real. I can’t decipher it fully, I can’t remember it all, but it was so actual, so sensual, as if the devil was in my cell, the ceiling of the cell was lifted away, and God was above it all. It was all straight from commonplace religious folk art. I don’t know. I didn’t see God because God did not even actually show himself to Moses. God is blinding, but I did see that God -- now I can say it -- had a beard. The God of iconography. And a devil with hooves.

. . .  It was then that I began to be a believer.  . . . Everything was one that night. The main feeling was the feeling of the oneness of the experience and my oneness with it. Before then I had felt mostly discord within myself, but that night I had such a feeling of monolithic unity, of a sort I was never to experience again in my life.

. . . That night certainly transformed me and also the way I acted in prison. I have the impression that it was only after that night that I became human and was able to live in society with people. I changed my attitude toward my fellow prisoners, and I thought less about myself. Though I still thought constantly of Ola and Andrzej [his wife and his son] . . . that too had changed a lot because belief in the immortality of the soul had come to me with that experience. My relationship to my cell mates changed. I had learned to live with people, and it had come suddenly. Something had turned around and, for all my grief, I had peace.

. . . I had dysentery. By then I was a Christian. I had a temperature of almost 106, but the hallucinations did not return, even during the fever. (My Century, 291-293).

Later, out of prison, in Alma Ata (the capital of Kazakhstan), Wat wore a cross on a string around his neck and freely spoke of his conversion experience. Mikhail Zoshchenko, a satirical writer, challenged Wat:

“All right, we’re sitting in this room. Close your eyes and ask yourself if you believe in the divinity of Christ. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body, in the immortality of the soul, and so on?” I was a bit taken aback by that question, which was asked very seriously . . . I didn’t close my eyes, but I tried to sound myself out. I really couldn’t answer his question.

I told him that I didn’t think it mattered if I believed at this very minute or not (after reflecting on it) but I assumed that once you had real faith, it was totally yours and you could not become a disbeliever, because you were in a place without any fundamental contradictions, where all the counterarguments were meaningless. That if you had been in that place once, you could find the path that led back to it. But it’s like a fairy tale: the place is there but the path is lost (p.325)

Aside from the “human, all too human” detail of God’s beard, Wat’s vision of the deity also seems close to Gnosticism: a remote, serene god, “distant but real.” The devil ruled over history, full as it was of hatred, fanaticism, and violence. But above it spread divine majesty and peace, and all was harmony and oneness -- perhaps akin to the pleroma (fullness) of the Gnostics. There was no contradiction and no room for doubt.

God’s beard and the devil’s hooves aside (oh, the power of images!), the god of Wat’s vision seems to be the god of deists. America’s Founding Fathers, for instance, believed that god created the world and the laws of nature, but afterwards he never concerned himself with the universe. He only set it in motion. As Shelley put it in “Mont Blanc”:

Power dwells apart in its tranquility,
Remote, serene, and inaccessible.

an abandoned locomotive in a site of a former gulag in Siberia

**

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

I have discovered that atheism is a journey and has various depths, just like stages of religious belief. From the perspective of time, it seems somewhat funny that my own journey started with the complete skepticism of a child who felt (but didn’t dare admit out loud) that the Bible stories were fairy tales, except much more disturbing. Then followed a period of devout faith (after reading Terese of Lisieux Story of a Soul I did, of course, want to be a Carmelite nun). That faith began crumbling as I grew older and couldn’t quite resist the impression that it was all nonsense.

I always hated the choking smell of incense, even before I knew that originally, in the Jerusalem temple sacrifice ritual on which the Catholic mass was based, it was meant to cover up the smell of the blood of the sacrificed animals. The smoke of incense grew more and more irritating. It seemed so primitive and discordant with the liturgy that evolved later. It was when the smoke created a bluish curtain around the altar and my eyes teared from the pollutants that I couldn’t help intuiting what was being hidden from us: not only was it all nonsense, but sheer archaic nonsense, millennia behind the times.

At first I was very upset over my growing doubts -- a sin! I was sinning in thought! I tried to redouble my zeal. Finally, at fourteen, I had my “de-conversion experience,” if I may coin a term. In a second, the thought “It’s just another mythology” reversed years of Catholic indoctrination. And the thought itself was irreversible.

I thought I was done forever not just with Catholicism, but with any form of theism. Soon after my arrival in America, I was severely warned never to describe myself as an atheist because I would shock and offend people. I labeled myself an agnostic.

It’s amazing what a word can do. “Agnostic” precluded the possibility of knowledge, but not the possibility that a deity might actually exist. Agnosticism seemed intellectually superior to atheism. Theistic doubt began encroaching on my atheism. What if god did exist? Not the god according to the Catholic church, but  . . .  a true god, a cosmic god, beyond human comprehension but perhaps able to manifest itself and communicate through signs such as natural phenomena and synchronicities.

This seemed pretty attractive: a friendly universe. The churches were corrupt human institutions and could not be trusted; not so the universe. The stars shone with a pure light, unclouded by the stench of incense. The New Age movement was in full bloom all around me, and the word “spiritual” was in the air. Almost everyone I met kept saying, “I am not religious, but I’m spiritual.” And it was not unusual for me to hear, “I think you are a deeply spiritual person.” My poetry was praised as spiritual.

I didn’t know why people perceived me as spiritual -- I didn’t meditate  or practice yoga. I didn’t even keep a journal, though all my women friends did. Perhaps it was enough that I wasn’t interested in money, but rather in ideas and meaning. And perhaps some of my vague longing for the “real god” did show, especially in my poems (but was it really my own creative unconscious that I was coming to trust?). I offer the one below as a bit of comic relief:

GREATER LOS ANGELES

“Now the weather for Greater Los Angeles,”
the announcer would announce. I was thrilled

by those words, thrilled to live 
in Greater Los Angeles – as if beyond the city

rose a greater, more magnificent city,
not of suburbs and shopping malls,

but of towers, temples, and aerial bridges.
The downtown had its moments of grandeur:

the pyramid-hatted City Hall, the sprawling
post office, its two tiled domes,

the Egyptian tomb of the Central Library,
the Union Station inlaid with rare marble;

above traffic signs, a billboard like blue flame:
ETERNAL VALLEY, SECOND EXIT.

Greater Los Angeles! It sounded like a promise
that greater everything existed: a luminous sky

beyond this pallid and polluted one; a greener
green, not this parched beige-gray. Watching over,

not the jealous god of wrath, not the tribal warlord
who sayeth, Vengeance is mine, but a greater

unknown god of whom Thomas Hardy wrote,
and Emily Brontë – for whom they wrote.

“Who is your audience?” teachers always
asked, but I wasn’t going to tell them.

~ Oriana © 2012   

*                                                                                                                                                                

Hardy wrote the poem “Agnostoi Theoi” -- “To the Unknown God.” It’s not a very good poem, but the title -- the best part -- made a great impression on me when I was in my twenties and not ruling out some degree of return to religion later in life. As I already mentioned, I started to be haunted by theist doubts.

It wasn’t the kind of torment that trying to believe was, being beset by atheist doubts; I felt that the only god worth worshipping would not throw people into the burning lake for not having adhered to the right doctrine. It (that still seemed the most fitting, cosmic pronoun) would consider only kindness, and even then, would take a compassionate, psychological approach: for instance, an abused child  might come to identify with his tormentors and later find it difficult to be kind -- those extenuating circumstances would be considered. There’d be understanding and consolation, not punishment.

I still believe that kindness is very important. Imagine if the only religion in the world was what the Dalai Lama said: “My religion is kindness.”

My adolescent de-conversion experience did not change my ethical values. I still take great delight in beauty and affection. People I have known for a long time continue to grow ever more dear to me. Being alive is precious and amazing; having consciousness is a gift, a feast, a miracle almost. But the hunger for the “real god” seems to have faded away. The universe does not need a ruler any more than the ocean needs an ocean deity. The cosmos is self-evolving.

I can’t point to the exact moment when I gained what I call “atheist clarity.” Perhaps it was when I was talking about medical advances yet to come and my listener said, “Oh but I do want to die. I want to experience living in the spirit world.” Once more I realized that I did not believe in any spirit world. I did not believe in ghosts, including the inner little ghost that would survive physical death. “Soul,” for all the Jungian attempts to revivify that word, to make it non-denominational and acceptable to the educated, was simply psyche, the activity of the brain (and no, to me the brain could never be “a kind of radio,” receiving signals from the astral world).

And synchronicity, that new holy of holies and supposed manifestation of the spirit, was due to selective attention and selective memory. As for personal “destiny” and meaning in life, we both discover and create those ourselves. I definitely don’t believe that a pre-existing, brain-free “soul” chooses its parents and its task in life, but the memory of its choice is erased before birth so that we would start out clueless and confused in the dark woods of life -- just a divine game that results in much suffering, but so what? Just learn to navigate by omens. I used to do precisely that, and actually still often do, as part of the creative process -- but with the understanding that it’s not the universe trying to guide me, but my brain trying to find pattern and coherence.

The fear that life would seem very bleak as a result of dropping “spirituality” has proved false. Oddly enough, just as people report greater appreciation of others after a conversion experience, the  more I acknowledged being a hard-core atheist, the more I saw how amazingly heroic and kind people can be, what a hard struggle many lives are, how impressive the things that can be accomplished not only by individuals, but especially as a result of cooperation. To the question, “Don’t you wish there was someone to say thank-you to?” I reply, “But of course there is: the people around me.”

*

And yet I have to admit that there used to a persistent fantasy of “someone.” A mind, a voice -- “face to face” was hoping for too much, and besides, isn’t the starry sky face enough? But for lack of a better word, yes, someone to greet me at the end of the journey, like a loved one waiting for me at a train station. Someone who’d just answer my questions: Why was I born? Was there a special task I was supposed to accomplish? Like Dostoyevski’s Ivan Karamazov, I did not want paradise, but answers to my questions.

Now I know that those were the wrong questions. I was born, period. Not “born for” any special purpose. I have to discover and shape my own purpose, different at different stages of my life. I alone can answer my questions, not so much at the end of the journey but all along.

Of course no man or woman is an island; our logos is part of the collective logos. Among the people to whom I want to say thank you, I single out Jesse Bering, the author The Belief Instinct. His book brilliantly dispelled any lingering nostalgia for the “real god.” The exposition of why god is a cognitive illusion is empirical rather than merely philosophical, and beautifully non-shrill.

Bering even wonders if shattering the illusion of god is good for humanity. I can’t speak for humanity, only for myself. Unexpectedly, I became a happier person as an unblinking atheist. I felt more clarity than I’d ever dared hope for. Closing the “spiritual” door focused my attention on how best to live this life, without wasting time on speculating about the afterlife.

But remembering that no so long ago I too entertained some hope that a “real god” might exist helps to keep me tolerant -- at least as long as no one threatens me with hellfire. For me heaven and hell are states of mind. By choosing the peacefulness of “heaven,” I too can have my mini-experience of Emily Brontë walking on the moors, the Gnostics contemplating the blissful union with “fullness,” or Aleksander Wat’s vision of serenity even in wartime.  And -- what a gift! -- I’ve come across a quotation from Rilke: “To work is to live without dying.”

In my youth I half-suspected that the fear of death and a longing for an afterlife would in the end prevail over the voice of reason. What could poor reason do as it got closer to the abyss? Who knew that quiet voice had such power . . . 

And imagine the joy of discovering: no coward soul is mine.

  Darlene:

Have you seen Vincent Bugliosi’s article on Huffington Post?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vincent-bugliosi/why-do-i-doubt-both-the-a_b_844611.html
 
Let me quote the last two paragraphs:
 
I believe that the question of the existence of God is an impenetrable mystery and beyond human comprehension. As Einstein, who was an agnostic (so was Darwin), put it: "The problem is too vast for our limited minds." But even if it were not, doubt is divine in that it impels a search for the truth, thereby opening the door to knowledge. Faith puts a lock on the door. And as knowledge increases, faith recedes. Even though I don't feel that a belief in God (theism) or disbelief in him (atheism) is unintelligent, I do feel that a certitude about either of these two positions, even a strong belief in them, which is so extremely common, is, perforce, unintelligent. Put another way, since the depth of a belief should be in proportion to the evidence, no sensible person should be dogmatic about whether there is or is not a God. I have always liked Clarence Darrow's observation about the existence vis-à-vis non-existence of God: "I do not pretend to know what ignorant men are sure of."

The whole matter of God can perhaps be distilled down to this. Is there a God who created the world? Or is God a word we use to explain the world? In either event, God should only be a question.

Oriana:
 
Yes, I’ve read the article. I love it: God should only be a question. I realize that intellectually agnosticism cannot be touched -- unless by statisticians who might argue that if the probability that god doesn't exist is 99.9999%, that's as good as non-existence. 

But maybe there is an emotional element in my relatively recent preference for clear-cut atheism: I love mystery, but in some matters I prefer the cold light of clarity. Keeping options open in the “I don’t know” position is somewhat stressful. Closing an option lets me move on. I’m happier now than when I saw myself as a “spiritual seeker” -- though I realize that “happier” is not intellectually respectable. For intellectual respectability, I refer everyone, including myself, to Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct and its very satisfying demonstration that god is a cognitive illusion based on our brain’s hardwired tendency to see pattern and purpose, and an agent behind that purpose. It's been argued that it's more natural for us to believe in the supernatural.

I’m indebted to Bugliosi for pointing out that there is no scriptural validation of either immortality of the soul (the idea comes from Plato) or free will (all that happens is the will of god; furthermore, god leads us into temptation).

But Bugliosi misrepresents the argument that Dawkins makes about the complexity of god. Dawkins argues that, based on evidence we have, we conclude that evolution proceeds from the simple to the complex. To assume that a deity of unimaginable complexity would precede and create the simple (but with evolution toward complexity somehow predestined) strains belief. 

But all is forgiven for the sake of the quotation by Gertrude Stein that this article provides, and on which I’m willing to fall back in those situations where to confess to atheism would be social suicide:

There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.



Hyacinth:

Emily Brontë's poem gets more pertinent every time I read it, especially that third stanza: "Vain are the thousand creeds / that move men's  hearts, unutterably vain." The choice of the word vain. She voices the conclusions I have come to.

And yet I do not begrudge the years I spent in the church. Better to have had beliefs and change them than to have nothing at all, no foundation. It's the Judeo-Christian god I disbelieve but not that there is a presence (god within). By “presence” I mean the feeling of harmony and being one with everything, an experience I have when I am in nature and take delight in watching the moon rise, for instance.

Walking the moors as Emily Brontë did feels the equivalent of my long walks on the beach. The ocean helps me override the daily stuff.

I would recommend the course I took, or rather sat in on, called the Bible as Literature. I gained from it even though it has taken years to give up God with capitol G and accept that god is everywhere and in everything, and is not vindictive or  jealous.

I'm working on a poem right now questioning "soul” -- what is it, or who. I agree with Bugliosi: "god should only be a question. "

I like the Dalai Lama's  "my religion is kindness." It should be a motto for the world.

The blog is exceptional and the choice of art always adds so much. Thank you.

Oriana:

I’m all for Bible as Literature. “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (no wonder that the new conservative students reject Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman . . . I'm not sure about Dickinson, but she wasn't exactly orthodox . . . )

Do I regret having been indoctrinated? Yes and no. No only because without knowing the bible stories and the whole religious mentality one can't understand the literature of past centuries. Or art right up to the Dutch art -- so much art before then is religious; imagine not understanding what a pietà is about, and all the crucifixes. So for the Western cultural heritage, the religious grounding is needed. 

The whole concept of god is not one I'd have ever figured out for myself -- as a child, I felt no need for such a being. Smelled rat as soon as the nun said "He's invisible because he’s a ghost" (in Polish, as in German, the word is “ghost” -- there is no distinction between “spirit” and “ghost”). I still remember how her voice hushed up with reverence when she said “ghost.” I never believed in ghosts, witches, Santa Claus, etc. God was a strange ghost, though, not the white shape but a middle-aged (or old) man with a beard. Robes and other things varied, but the beard had to be there.

Speaking of the beard: Michelangelo seems to have fixed its length, so it wasn’t the waist-long white beard that you see in early icons. Michelangelo based his god directly on Zeus. And that reminds me: to understand literature, especially the literature of the past, one also needs to know classical mythology -- at least the major myths. And it’s fascinating to ponder the fact that Dante and Milton, to mention just the giants, wrote about Greco-Roman mythology as factual. No mythology was to be questioned; it’s just that you were forbidden to worship the old gods. 

And that made sense: if you say that any mythology is a human invention, that Wotan or Zeus never existed, then what’s to stop exactly the thought that I had at fourteen: that the Judeo-Christian tradition is just another mythology. The creation myth, the flood and Noah’s Ark, the three magi, the savior born of a virgin and a god -- that’s so obviously mythological. I’m all in favor of studying these stories as literature and mythology. Then we can really take delight in them, just as we enjoy sacred music -- no belief required. As for the nasty stories, they can be skipped, perhaps? Or maybe de-emphasized? I realize the magnitude of the problem, with so much sex and violence in the bible.

What I regret is the enormous anguish the religious indoctrination caused. I felt I was a dreadful sinner and would certainly go to hell. I despaired of ever being able not to sin in thought. My actions weren’t too bad, but my thoughts, so sinful! For instance, I'd look at another girl's pretty dress, and wish I had this dress -- right away the sin of envy! Or was it "coveting"? To be on the safe side, I confessed to both. What nonsense all that was. So much suffering in the world, and here priests and nuns worked to torment children in this manner -- thinking it was a saintly thing, of course.

And the Judeo-Christian god had a huge ego. I was always put off by all the required praise, praise, praise. As an adult I saw that that was a primitive form of appeasement. Early in the history of humanity, all deities were mostly cruel, but if you praised them loud enough and long enough, morning noon and night, and offered sacrifices (eaten by the priests, but that was OK for some reason), the god in question was less likely to hit you with lightning, earthquake, flood, etc. Praise was prophylactic. It didn’t always work, but you didn’t dare stop praising (a similar phenomenon occurred with the cult of Stalin and Hitler -- you had to praise them. On a minor scale, employees are likely to flatter the boss).

I’ve never felt the “presence,” no matter how defined, but I’ve felt tremendous love for trees, birds, squirrels, a bear seen at a safe distance -- for nature. And cats and dogs, even fish and turtles. It used to worry me somewhat, this not “feeling the presence.” I didn’t feel the presence of god in nature -- I just felt that nature was magnificent, amazing. But in the end kindness means so much more than subjective feelings.

I’ve felt awe, of course, and other intense positive feelings. But divine presence, never. Divine love for me, never. That was OK, in a way, since I did not love god -- how can you love someone you fear? If you fear someone, the normal reaction is to hate him. My inability to love the god of wrath worried me, another reason I expected to go to hell. I would be damned to be tortured for eternity because I could not force myself to love  this nightmarish monster that spied on me and wrote down my sins. (The nuns at least created the impression that all sins are written down on one side of the ledger, and “good deeds” on the other side -- maybe not in the case of non-Catholics, who were going to hell anyway, so why keep records.)

Christ said “no judgment,” and yet he was to come the second time as the judge presiding over the Last Judgment, separating the saved from the damned. Note the innumerable paintings of the Last Judgment -- a favorite subject. Even that church in our Little Italy -- Our Lady of the Rosary -- has a huge, horrific fresco of the Last Judgment (facing the fresco of the Crucifixion). And that church isn’t that old -- it was built in 1928. Keep them scared -- the foundation of old-time Catholicism was psychological terror. Knowing that, it’s all the more remarkable that the mystics (in all religions) all seemed to experience a loving deity. But mystical visions generally arise in situations we’d call abnormal: epilepsy, starvation, high fever. The clergy wanted blind obedience from their “flock of sheep,” and not mystical visions that were typically contrary to the teachings, with benevolence instead of hellfire.

Hyacinth:

The angel is so lovely. Sad that her arm is broken. Tied to the tree she could be Joan of Arc, such a gentle loving expression.

Oriana:

I'm amazed that someone cared enough to tie the angel to the tree -- and she is beautiful -- rather than just let the statue lie on the ground and decay. These are the untended Polish graves -- untended because at the end of WWII the Polish population of Lvov got expelled and resettled either in Poland (the lucky ones, including Zagajewski's family) or in the remote Asian regions of Russia.

I think I read (Zagajewski?) that a handful of Poles did manage to stay in Lvov somehow. Maybe one of them cd not bear to see the lovely angel "die." An even more touching possibility is that someone Ukrainian fell in love with this loveliest of cemetery angels, and wanted to save it. 

John:

It's hard to be around believers.  Yesterday, I went to a local writers' group.  It's been a while since I attended, and there were some new members.  One woman, a hospice volunteer, a new member, introduced her prose piece by talking about how it was written as a response to a prompt.  All the workers and volunteers at the hospice were writing about how they saw heaven.  She talked about how what she wrote was just that, her personal vision of what heaven is.

Listening to her intro, I felt this will be interesting.  I thought about my daughter's childhood vision of heaven as a place where she would meet her favorite book characters.

The woman's piece was a disappointment. Her vision of heaven was the thing I least wanted: rainbows, 12 pearly gates, people walking around in long white robes with gold trim and talking about how beautiful the gates are. There was nothing of her in the vision. Nothing personal. Not a single reference to "I." No real comfort finally.

When she was finished, one of the other new members talked about how much he liked the piece and the great rewards that come to us even here on earth if we believe in Jesus. He talked too about the punishment that comes to people if they don't believe. Misery, poverty, and sudden terrible death, tsunamis and earthquakes, mudslides and tornados.

I was thinking about the two of them as I wrote you that note about Emerson.

There's something sad about the vision of heaven and monstrous in the vision of life and punishment.
 
Oriana:

Thanks for sharing this. I suspect that for some people there has been a mental regression -- literacy has ebbed, and they are simply less intelligent as result of not reading anything the least bit challenging, and maybe even more so as result of not having read books in childhood when the brain was developing. Televangelists who say that Sandy Hook happened because there is no prayer in school make things worse. But essentially it's the lack of education that makes part of the American population primitive in their worldview, and religious in that stick-and-carrot way.

I know you live in a small town, and as you said, that’s in many ways like the 19th century. Small towns can be so backward, with their fundamentalism and their love of guns, their paranoid hatreds and alcoholism. It all somehow goes together with believing in a monstrous god of wrath. Apart from campus town, large cities seem to me oases where educated people live, with their broader outlook and more modern, secular worldview. Or maybe they are New Age, which may be silly but at least it let go of eternal punishment. Step outside these academic or metropolitan oases, and you are in enemy territory. 
 
**

John:

Many years after the war, my mother went back to her home town west of Lvov looking for the graves of her mother and her sister and her sister's baby.  She asked at the churches in the area, and she asked the people who were her neighbors.  No one knew anything about her graves or what happened to the bodies of her mother and sister and the baby.  She and my father finally bought a plot at the local cemetery and placed a stone on it with the names of my mother's dead.  
 
Oriana:

This salvaged angel seems the perfect memento of those who never got a proper burial.

I am glad your deceased relatives got a commemoration. Three of my relatives (an aunt and two cousins) died in the camps and they have no graves. The older cousin fought with the resistance and his name is on the monument to war heroes in his hometown. The other two were simply innocents who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Peace, peace.