The Weather Gods in a Disenchanted Cosmos (expanded)

I’d like to say that I find [Georgia] Governor Perdue’s emphasis on prayer to address droughts baffling. But I don’t. I understand it completely. Growing up Southern Baptist, I regularly prayed until about midway through college when I turned into a freedom-hating Bolshevik surrender monkey. But even if I understand where he’s coming from, it’s still strange. Although it’s a seemingly harmless practice, it logically implies the existence of a sadistic, cruel and petty God. Indeed, as people like Hitchens point out with characteristic tact, much of Christian doctrine – I now realize – assumes precisely this sort of God.

There are a couple of aspects to this implied petty cruelty (with respect to prayer). The first is simply that God apparently causes these events (drought, coal mine collapse, sick child, etc.) in the first place. Looking specifically at Georgia, praying for rain obviously assumes that God has some sort of control over the weather. Thus, he either caused the drought, or allowed it to happen. And once caused, the act of prayer assumes that God could step in and end it. --Publius at Obsidian Wings.

From this standpoint, a faith in a personal God belongs to a less mature standpoint, where one still needs the sense of a personal relation to things; one is not yet ready to face the ultimate truth.  A line of thinking of the nature, steadily gathering strength, runs through modern thought and culture, from Spinoza, through Goethe, to our present time. --Charles Taylor, quoted in my earlier post The Zeitgeist of Unbelief

I'm preparing a longer essay based on further reflections on Taylor's A Secular Age in which I want to convey the complex of elements that contributed to the shift from the enchanted world taken for granted by premoderns to the disenchanted universe we all live in now. But when I read this post by Publius, it struck me that his reaction to the idea of praying for better weather as implying an assumption (unconscious for those who do it) that God is cruel seems quite reasonable. Why would he allow (or cause?) such terrible things to happen in the first place if, as when praying to him, one assumes he has the power to stop them once they happen? 

I don't want to get into some abstract discussion of theodicy; I'm more interested rather to try to understand this urge to pray for deliverance from natural disaster as a lingering element of premodern consciousness. It makes complete sense in an enchanted world, but it's hard to make sense of it in a disenchanted one, even if you are a religious believer in it. I think there is a way, though, that prayer makes perfect sense in a disenchanted world. But one has first to understand the shift in the way the "buffered self" experiences the sacred from the outer world to the inner world. This is a theme I have already explored to a certain extent in a post called From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen.   

It shouldn't be a surprise for Christians that things should have developed in this outer-to-inner pattern, since we are told repeatedly in the gospels that the coming of the Christ meant the inauguration of the Kingdom within. And so when the experience of the gods (by which I mean the spiritual dimension of reality) moves gradually from out-there to in-here, there is a corresponding shift from an experience of being the puppets or playthings of the gods, to being a new kind human who has autonomy, dignity, and freedom. And this experience requires as a precondition that humans become detached or disembedded from the world out-there which contrasts with the enmeshment with out-there that characterizes the experience of normal premoderns.

Christians like me embrace the disenchantment of the cosmos as an uncomfortable, but important necessary step to allow for the emergence of the free human individuality.  In the premodern world, there was an oppressive sense of being overwhelmed by or manipulated by beings in the spiritual world. Encounters with the beings there made humans feel so small, weak, and insignificant in comparison.  It was as if in order to grow up humans had to shut them out so that they could come into thei own. But it does not necessarily follow that because humans repressed it, it does not exist. So there are two implications here that might make traditional, especially reformed-tradition Christians uncomfortable. First, I don't think of the human being as completely depraved and helpless.  Second, I think it unlikely that the world, in itself is in fact disenchanted, even if our experience of it is.  For me it is an interesting question how once human autonomy and freedom are more securely established, humans need to open up again to that world they have so successfully repressed. That's at least in part what I mean by second naivete.

What interests me about Taylor is that he is essentially describing in considerably more detail the same process that Owen Barfield describes in his book Saving the Appearances, which I discuss in the above-mentioned "From Outer to Inner".  It's the emergence of a new kind of consciousness from what Barfield calls "original participation", into a different kind of human being Taylor calls "the buffered self". Original participation is a state that is most extreme in animistic and shamanic societies, and it is characterized by what Taylor calls the "porous self", a self that is radically  open if not fused with the spirit world world around him or her, including the world of spirits, faeries, demons, angels, and gods/goddesses.

For the porous self lives in a world characterized by original participation, and as such his identity is fused with the tribal and totemic identity, with the natural world around him, and with the larger cosmos in which all that subsists.  Everything is connected and interwoven.  It's hard to tell where I end and everything else begins. For the porous self's sense of self as me-over-here separated from everything-else-over-there, the sense of a subject-object split, is simply not part of its existential experience. It lives in a world that is more like the world of "Princess Mononoke" than the world of "Blade Runner", a world of nature spirits rather than cyborgs.  The cyborg--the human machine--is what the buffered self evolves into unless the human self finds a way, genuinely and without losing its freedom, autonomy, and dignity, to reopen itself to the spiritual world. 

Moderns, however, do sometimes have "peak experiences" in which all the boundaries break down, and people who have this experience report how it has given them insight into the "oneness" of everything. Pantheism is an attempt to philosophize from such experiences.  But theism requires a sense of separation, of face-to-face, of me here You there.  In Christian theism, there is even separation within the Godhead, which is a communion of three persons that participate in one being.  I think the goal for humans is to become similarly a community of created "persons" that participate in One Being.  But participating and merging are not the same thing, not if merging means losing one's sense of self and identity as a free individual.  Christian theism is not about merging, but about freedom, differentiation, and communion. Moving out of the condition of the porous self is a necessary step in the realization of freedom and differentiation, what remains is the movement forward into communion.

For those for whom the concept of the "porous self" seem strange, think of the world Homer depicts in the Iliad. Homeric humanity illustrates how the porous self it typified was not free, although Odysseus is the beginning of something new. Although I've given the following example before, I need to repeat it  to stress the point I want to make here.  I remember when I first read about the confrontation between Achilles and Hector, and Hector lost it and was overcome by panic and was chased around the walls by Achilles, none of the Trojans thought Hector had disgraced himself by such cowardly behavior. I wondered why. Barfield and  Taylor explain it by their ideas about original participation and the porous self.

Homeric-era Greeks would not have thought Hector personally responsible for his actions. No one saw Hector as having failed, but rather the gods having abandoned Hector. And since the Greek gods owed humans nothing, that was just bad luck.  Hector was a hero not because there was anything particularly heroic about Hector the man in our contemporary understanding of the word, but because he was favored by Apollo or whichever god of the moment wanted the Trojans to win. In other words, the Greek heroes are puppets; it's not they who are fighting but the gods who use them as their chess pieces. A hero is someone who is especially favored by the gods who use him for their own purposes. Once the god abandons him, he's a scared little man running around the walls. Not his fault.  But bad luck for the rest of us. If our hero loses, it means the gods have abandoned us.

Now I would argue that when people pray for better weather, it really is a vestige of this older consciousness in which there was a hierarchy of gods on the lower levels of which were the weather gods. According to Eliade and other ethnographers, many animist societies had the idea of One God, the supreme deity, but didn't really bother much with him because he was so remote and unconcerned with the local goings on.  Eliade and other ethnographers call such a god the "deus otiosus".  The people in these societies didn't concern themselves too much with the deus otiosus because he didn't seem too concerned with human affairs. So they turned their attention to the more local gods, the nature spirits, gods of the hearth, and so forth. Those gods could be supplicated, and they could provide practical help. The tribal shaman was called in for particularly difficult cases because he was an initiate, a man of knowledge, who best understood the ways of these local gods.

Now Judaism after Moses was pretty ruthless about requiring the Jews to disengage with these local gods.  The Jewish revelation was that the Deus Otiosus had a name, and he was coming out of retirement, and that he cared.  Barfield talks in a very compelling way of the role the Jews played in the emergence out of original participation, and of the essential role played in those developments by their near-obsessive monotheism and rejection of the ordinary religious consciousness of the peoples which surrounded them. Once again mature theism requires differntiation and separation.  The first step was to separate out of the surrounding culture seeped in original participation. When Christianity came along, it emerged in the context of a pluralistic culture of mystery religions that pervaded the Roman Empire, and when Christianity emerged as the dominant narrative among those mystery religions and spread through Europe, it absorbed into itself much of the animistic consciousness of the shamanic cultures of the Germans and Celts. The  monotheism was there, but deemphasized.

So popular Christianity during the medieval period was an amalgam of Jewish Monotheism and pagan animism, with this peculiar intermediary figure, Jesus, who seemed to have a foot in both worlds. He was the human face of the deus otiosus, and he had an intimate and very direct connection to human affairs. In the medieval Catholic cosmology there was the implicit understanding that there were evil spirits and good, helpful spirits, and Jesus, Mary Queen of Angels, Michael the archangel, and the hosts of heaven in the communion of saints--the cloud of witnesses--cared deeply and passionately about human affairs. And they longed to play a role in them, but could only do so if they were asked. 

That's the key to understanding intercessory prayer, and I would suggest, without trying to make a full-bore argument about it, that the difference between Christian relationship with the spiritual world and the pagan understanding.  And while it was still immature during the medieval period and still had much of the spirit of pagan propitiatory prayer, the Christian idea of intercession holds within it the beginning of the idea of spiritual freedom--because the all-powerful creator god reveals himself as the suffering servant who does not command or manipulate like the pagan gods--but seeks to liberate humans from the compulsivity that characterized the older religious consciousness. 

All of this is very interesting and needs more time than I can give it here to unravel how all these layers of things influence our peculiar early postmodern consciousness. But to me the interesting thing is Taylor's recounting how the purist, iconoclastic monotheistic strain in Judaism was picked up by the iconoclastic disenchanting Protestant reformers, particularly in the Calvinist stream, and had the unintended consequence of setting the stage on the one hand for God reverting to a deus otiosus in Deism, which was a preliminary stage to we humans having killed him sometime in the 19th century, according to Nietzsche. Or, on the other hand, of setting the stage for the contradictory God who if he has the power to stop things like the holocaust or tsunamis, must be a monster to have allowed them in the first place.  Better that he were dead.

So when it comes to the weather, I'd guess that Governor Perdue doesn't think there could be any such thing as weather spirits--that would be too pagan. (I'm agnostic on the matter myself.  Maybe in some Findhornish way it's possible to find a way to work with such beings to bring the rain. Not a concern of mine at the moment.) But his prayers probably have more to do with that old pagan propitiation than they do with mature Christian intercessory prayer--which at its deepest level is about asking for clarity and wisdom in the use of one's conscience and freedom.

The mature Christian does not expect an all-powerful God to dramatically break into time/space  to manipulate nature in marvelous ways. I don't doubt that he could, if he chose to, but that's not how the suffering-servant God works.  The earth and its future is a human project.  It's on us humans, not God.  But nothing we humans do is good unless it's inspired by grace.  And that's the key to prayer--not to ask God to get it done, but to ask for the wisdom or inspiration that will enable us to get it done. And there is help there for us if we choose to avail ourselves of it.

UPDATE: Writing this post reminded me to the poem that first most powerfully described to me our conditions as moderns, Eliot's "The Wasteland". Here's an excerpt from the section entitled The Fire Sermon:

 

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf   
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,    
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends    

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.    
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;   
Departed, have left no addresses.    
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...    
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,    
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.    
But at my back in a cold blast I hear   
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.   

When I first read Eliot's poem in late adolescence, I didn't understand it, but it became an emblem for me of our conditions as moderns and also implicit in it a kind of beacon of hope for it also pointed to an honest, authentic way out, a way Eliot, a flawed man as we all are, found not too long after having written this poem.  The "Four Quartet,"  "The Family Reunion," and "The Cocktail Party" are a testament both to his flaws and to his liberation.

Comments

[Kevin McManus]

Brilliant! I love the last paragraph. on a head level I totally agree with. on the heart level though I still rage at God for not answering my whines. I need to integrate the head knowledge, but it's so much easier just to read about it...3 Good books for you:

"Globalization, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace", by Daniel Groody [Orbis]

"Eschatology & Hope", by Anthony Kelly [Orbis]

"Arise My Love...", by William Johnson [Orbis]

"Teilhard De Chardin-The Divine Milieu Explained: A Spirituality for the 21st Century", by Louis Savary [Paulist Press]

[forestwalker]

Are you familiar with the Eastern churches' teachings on theosis Jack?

[Jack Whelan]

FW--

--Are you familiar with the Eastern churches' teachings on theosis--

Yes, I am. The Catholic idea of sanctification is very similar. St. Francis is the paradigm of the divinized human being, the man so identified with the Christ that he is transformed right down into the cells of the body and animal life is tamed in his presence because his own instinctual life has been transformed, as well, in such a way that I like to think of having created an eschatological force field in which lion lies down with lamb.

Zossima's body putrefying so quickly in The Brothers Karamozov could be a scandal only in a religious culture that expects its great saints to have similarly been divinized down to the cellular level.

Taylor is very good in laying out the reasons for the loss of this in Protestant Christianity, and by extension in modernity in general. The Reformed traditions wanted to talk about only one-speed of Christianity rather than there being levels--like beginner, intermediate, and expert. Either you're saved or you're not; so either you're right or you're wrong; and if I think you're wrong, you're damned, and if you're damned I have to start a new church of the regenerate. I like the levels idea better. It allows for distinguishing levels of Christianity that seems harder to do in the flatter Protestant model which promotes greater levels of fragmentation and sectarianism.

I remember when I was at YDS being surprised how uncomfortable my Calvinist and Lutheran housemates were with the idea of some Christians being "holier" than others, or that such a thing would be even a legitimate Christian aspiration. This is not a strange idea for Catholics and Orthodox, and while I understood the reasons for their objections about the dangers of Pelagianism and in creating a kind of spiritual caste system, and the kind of abuses that come with that, I would argue it was an overreaction, and other more serious issues about leveling and complacency arise as result.

Growing up Catholic, I always thought of Protestants as colorless, flat, boring, moralistic, and wondered what the attraction could possibly be. I came to understand later that the key to genuine Protestantism was the centrality of conscience and of the interior conversion. I don't think that's lost in Catholicism or orthodoxy, but it's not a prereq for for salvation, the way it is in some precincts of Protestantism. This has resulted in a kind of shallow extrincism among some overly legalistic or ritualistic Catholics who are always concerned about the correct form rather than inner transformation on the one hand. But on the other hand in the monastic traditions, one conversion is just the beginning of the journey into a deeper transformative process. So while Catholicism and Orthodoxy often promote a shallow spirituality, it also offers the possibility for greater depth to those who would seek it.

There's more to be said about this, but here and now's not the place or time.