I mentioned the other day that I was reading Wink's The Powers that Be in which he talks about the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he traces back to the primal, viciously violent battle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian cosmogonic myth. And at some point I want to come back to what Wink has to say about that, but before doing so, I'd like to present my own riff on the Christian cosmogonic myth, which is the creation story in Genesis. This is an exercise in retrieval of that which has been given to us out of the ancient sacred dream time.
When I speak of retrieval I mean two things: First approaching the artifacts of premodern consciousness with a second naivete. Second, making sense of it in terms that help you live a more deeply human life into the future. Second naivete means both suspending our materialistic/rationalistic biases while at the same time refusing to surrender critical consciousness.
I think that one of the biggest problems with the contemporary West lies in its inability to frame a cosmology open to the idea of the sacred. We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to explain, and yet we feel silly if we discuss seriously ideas about the cosmos on terms different than those that Carl Sagan would approve of. And when we read about the cosmogonies of the ancients, we sense they were onto something that we have lost the capacity to appreciate, and so we study them and talk about them in a kind of scholarly way so as not to let on that we think that maybe they knew something that we don't.
But my conviction has grown that both have it right—the moderns and the premoderns. The challenge is somehow to integrate in a new synthesis what each knows to be true. This is at the heart of what I mean by 'retrieval'. I think that the postmodern cultural paradigm that will arise in the coming decades will draw deeply from what the premoderns understood but which was rejected as incompatible with modern Enlightenment rationality.
I think think that as we move further along into a globalizing world there is going to be enormous pressure to fuse and differentiate. I'll go into what I mean by that another time, but one effect will be that as traditional societies absorb modern consciousness, modern societies will start once again to absorb elements of premodern consciousness. To take a fairly trivial example--look at how the martial arts of traditional Asia have come to dominate the action movie genre. But a very interesting book that documents how this is happening all over the place is Erik Davis's Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.
And on the other end it will be very interesting to watch developments within Tibetan Buddhism because they have maintained a very powerful link to the premodern and don’t seem particularly threatened by the modern. They know who they are, and they are interested to integrate what the West knows with what they know, and so it will be interesting to see if they become absorbed into modernity as Protestant Christianity has done, or whether they will absorb modernity and use what they absorb to further differentiate.
In what follows I want to make a provisional attempt to think mythopoetically about cosmology in a way that draws upon different strands in the western tradition--some orthodox, some esoteric--that makes sense in our day. It's meant to begin a discussion, because I'm just working on what intutiively seems right to me, but I'm sure many will find it hard to buy. The myth of modern Enlightenment rationality no longer has power; the Christian myth is dormant, and by default we are regressing into the Myth of Redmptive Violence. My interest lies in doing my part to awaken that which sleeps in the Chrisitan myth.
So you have to start somewhere. Central to what I want to do is find a coherent way of reintroducing the role of the Divine Feminine, which has very strong roots in the West, even though its importance has been significantly diminished with the disproportionate emphasis given to sense-centered rationality over the last thousand years.
I am convinced that if I’m right about a coming renaissance, a renewed understanding and experience of the “eternal feminine,” as Goethe called it, will be its central animating impulse. Indeed one can see signs of it all around us already, but the problem lies in distinguishing what is really flaky and superficial from what is deeply alive and true.
The ultimate criterion, for me at least, about whether something is ultimately accepted as true is in whether it resonates with these deep ancient traditional understandings of the way things are, and in order for resonance to occur, we need to think again analogically, metaphorically, imagistically, or symbolically, that is, to think more in the way premoderns think. Myth comes out of the premodern dream time; mythopoesis is soul thinking, but in a postmodern key.
Those premodern traditions are preserved for us in a variety of ways, but however we have access to them, they are like melodies that we need to learn how to play again, and once that melody has been woven into the fabric of our souls, we need then to learn how to improvise on those melodic themes. Improvisation isn’t really possible until the music is living in you, and I think of the following as a kind of riff on the central Christian melody, which was a riff on the older Jewish melody, and I consider both to be tunes that live very deeply within me. I frame it as a kind of counterpoint melody to Buddhism; in another piece I could instead stress the harmonies.
In Christian thought, especially in early medieval Neoplatonic thought which was most influential until the introduction of Aristotelian rationalism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there is a stream called apophatic or negative theology. It stresses primarily that since God is not a thing--a No-Thing--nothing meaningful can be affirmed about him. He is the ground of Being which is not the same as a Being because it transcends all Being. Whatever Being is, in whatever sense we experience it, God is not that--and so God can be described as not existing by any idea we have about what it means to exist. Which is not to say that there is no God, just that whatever we might think about him as he is in himself has nothing to do with what he really is.
My assumption has always been that Buddhism, insofar as it is considered atheistic, or non-theistic, shares common ground with this apophatic strand of thinking about God in Western thought. If our ordinary consciousness is too comfortable in samsara, the ordinary illusory nature of what we experience, anything it affirms about God with a consciousness that is bound up with illusion has to be illusory.
So there's this practical aspect to "atheistic" assertions about God. Whatever ideas you might have about who God is, are qualitatively not better than whatever ideas an atheist might have, and probably one's ideas about God are an impediment to really understanding the way things are, especially when it reinforces certain low-level ego/and false identity states. So Buddhism 101: get rid of the idea of God--too many problems. I can accept that as a kind of apophatic practical consideration, but I can't as a metaphysical assertion of truth.
The central idea that distinguishes Judaeo-Christian thought from eastern thought--and Western pagan thought, too--is the idea of creation from nothing. It is a difficult idea to grasp. If we can imagine a time before creation, then all there is is God. God fills everything. So how can God create out of nothing when there is no nothing? Is it possible to even think of a "before the moment of creation"? If so, how did God occupy himself for the eternity preceding that moment? And why all of a sudden did he want to change things? And how could there be an "all of a sudden" if there was no time?
This is where the apophatic tradition comes in handy because of its practical implication to bracket any consideration of God as he is in himself. But in the West, there is the idea that this God has revealed himself, which means while we may not be able to say anything about who God is in himself, we can say something about who he is for us. And Christians believe that this revelation was most fully given in the events that unfolded subsequent to the first Christmas. That's a really hard idea for non-Christians to accept, but if it is approached with an attitude of second naivete, it can make sense, profound sense. I do not seek to proseletyze here, only to describe the world as it has come to make sense to me. And thinking about how such a thing could be possible has been a central preoccupation of my life.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The story begins with creation from nothing, and this idea of creation has two basic implications. First, it affirms that God is something radically different from what he created--whatever creation is, God is not that--pantheism is not an option. Second, it affirms an intentionality and purposefulness that validates space and time, that the basic matrix of creation is good, that it is not some bad dream from which we must awaken. We may have ideas about it that are distorted and just plain wrong, but that does not mean that it is in itself not good. The earth is supremely important, and its destiny is human destiny.
So let's look at the implications of the idea of creation from nothing. First the idea that God is radically different from his creation, and transcends it completely. How to imagine such a thing? As suggested above, the first problem is that before creation there is no nothing to create out of--God is everywhere filling everything. I think that the most useful idea for understanding creation, even if it's just a metaphor, is the Jewish Kabbalistic idea of the tsim-tsum, which is that God created an empty space within himself, that he hollowed himself out or pulled himself back to create an emptiness.
In order for God to create out of nothing, first he had to create the Nothing, and so this is the first thing that he creates, the Nothing, And this nothing is nothing precisely because it is Not God, and yet it is surrounded by, enveloped by God.
So in the beginning, there is the primal polarity-- fullness/emptiness, or God/not-God. But emptiness is a relative term, and while it would be our tendency to think of emptiness as we think of outer space with nothing in it, it's better to think of it essentially as not-God and the biblical image for this is the Deep--the primordial waters or Chaos. This is the Not-God that filled the space that in the tsim-tsum God created within himself. And it is a No-Thing, I think it's a mistake to think about it as inert mass, like some primordial clay.
I think of it rather as a person, a cosmic spiritual being created in the image and likeness of the God who made her. She is the first born of all creation that differs in its essence from its creator as created differs from un-created. The Deep is the Divine Feminine, as much a personal being as the spirit which hovers over it in the image given to us in Genesis. She is a cosmic spiritual being who is the primal matrix, the fecund mother/matter out of which all creatures are born and have their being. The story of evolution is the story of the Primordial Chaos, the Divine Feminine, organizing, complexifying, differentiating.
Pantheists' experience of cosmic oneness with God is in my view a case of mistaken identity. They experience oneness with the Mother, not the Father. And yet the uncreated Father God reveals himself and his intentions through the Mother in whom and through whom creation came into being. The uncreated Godhead, as active principle, as Yang, works in partnership with the created Cosmic Mother, the Yin principle, who works freely in response to the will of the active Godhead who images or reflects himself in the created reality that is Not God, but with whom he is in intimate communion. This is an idea that leads to the retrieval of the Catholic idea of Mary as the mediatrix of all graces.
Now I realize this probably seems pretty far fetched, but it resonates with the bits and pieces of Marian doctrine Catholics have always held. I'm just putting this out as a kind of thought experiment that, for me at least, pulls together a lot of ideas about Mary that never made much sense. Mary, for Catholics, has always been more than this sweet unassuming Jewish girl who did the right thing. She was always more than that, and that made the Protestants very uncomfortable--they called it Mariolatry. But it's not Mariolatry if we understand Mary as first among created beings. Is it idolatrous to believe in angels and their hierarchies? Well, Mary is Queen of All Angels, who incarnated as Jesus incarnated, who was fully human as Jesus was fully human, but a created being, not uncreated as Jesus was. Isn't this consistent with the idea and explains the doctrine of Mary's having been herself born without original sin? She pre-existed Adam and Eve.
Mary is not God--she is a created being--but she was an essential partner with God in the creation of the cosmos. She is the apotheosis of the created divine human--and that's what the doctrine of her Assumption into heaven points to. She, born without original sin, because a primal partner with the Father in the creation of creation, is the instrument through whom the Godhead is incarnated in the world. But she is not "just" an angelic being; she too was truly human, and as such a proleptic image of what we shall all become when we become inwardly transformed into the image and likeness of the Godhead, an image and likeness that was never shattered in her as it was in the sons of man after the fall. Her body, after the Christ's resurrection, became itself a resurrection body, and that's what makes her apparitions at Fatima, Lourdes, Medjugorje, and so many other places, similar to the post resurrection appearances of Christ to the Apostles before Pentecost. For me there in no doubt whatsoever that those Marian apparitions were authentic. That doesn't make any sense to the modern imagination, but it can and will make sense in a kind of postmodern imagination that is now developing.
These are big, big issues, and they are hard to address with the thoroughness that a book length treatment of them could give. I can refer you to the work of some of the Russian Sophiologists like Soloviev, Bulgakov, Tomberg as sources for these ideas, but my point here is not to argue for their truth, but rather to illustrate what I mean by mythopoetic retrieval and second naivete. Others I'm sure can do it at a level that is far more satisfying that what I've attempted here. This is the kind of thing we will be seeing, not from theologians and in official church pronouncements, but in movies, fiction, maybe even TV. ("Lost", I would argue is an exercise in retrieval and fusion in this sense. Someone should do a riff along these on the significance of Mr. Eko's dope-filled Mary statues.) It will develop in the popular imagination, and after a while we will all take for granted ideas that seem impossible now. In the postmodern imagination, anything goes.
I also want to make the point that the telos or goal of Christian practice is not one of melting into the cosmic pleroma, but of a call to differentiation and freedom--and to love. But there is progressive love, the love of the future, and regressive love, the love of the past. And once this idea is grasped, so many other things fall into place, at least they do for me.
When I have time in the next week, I'll try to push this further, and eventually I want to work my way round to Wink's Myth of Redemptive Violence. As he points out, the Christian myth is its counter-myth. But his explanation of the Christian myth for me comes up short. In the Christian myth, it's not Marduk going to war with Tiamat, but the uncreated Divine Father working in a loving partnership with the created Divine Mother:
The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth:
While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.
When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth:
When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep:
When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth:
Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;
Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men. (Proverbs 8:22)
See also Cosmogenesis II