This post is a follow-up to Part 1, which should be read before this one. Both Parts I and II, with Parts III & IV to come, are attempts to represent to sane outsiders why the creedal elements in Christianity, as contrasted with a generalized transcendentalism, are so compelling to sane insiders. This a personal view, and, of course, I make no claims to represent anyone but myself. Although my approach might seem a little eccentric to some insiders, it leads ultimately to a ready acceptance on my part of the central tenets of the Christian faith. And anyway, it's not directed to insiders.
It's important for "insiders" to think about their experiences and beliefs in the face of their incomprehensibility to honest, curious outsiders. And such outsiders to Christianity are the primary audience to which I address these posts. I have particularly in mind people who feel closer to Sam Harris than they do to Andrew Sullivan in the interesting blogalogue they've been carrying on over the last week or so. Some "Harrisites" wrote me in response to two posts (see here and here) I put up in connection to the Harris/Sullivan debate, and I am writing with their concerns and questions in mind.
I assume that people in this camp, even though they call themselves atheists, are at least open to the idea that there are dimensions of reality that transcend the material world of our sense cognitions. Harris himself admits to having such an experience of transcendence (about which more later), but he says such experiences are what they are, and there is nothing in them that indicates definitively that there is a God or that Christianity is any different from any other religion. And I would agree with that.
But if one admits of there being a reality that transcends our ordinary sense experience, it shouldn't be that hard to accept that there are all kinds of experiences of transcendence and methods for experiencing it. Buddhists, for instance, have developed a variety of meditative technologies by which its practitioners can have certain kinds of experiences. Sufis another. Shamanic cultures yet another--for instance the vision quest of the Sioux and the experiences of the dream time of the Australian aborigines. There is the esotericism of Swedenborgians, anthroposophists, and Jewish Kabbalists. The point is that these are all in one way or another about experiences of transcendence, and they are not the same experience; they are not all about the same thing.
The phenomenology of religious experience is rich and varied, and I think of its varieties of experience as occurring in different rooms of a very large house. To get some sense of its range, if you are unfamiliar with the literature on it, start with William James's Varieties of Religious Experience or the many works of Mircea Eliade. I think this house also has a basement, and guys like Hitler and Stalin were frequent visitors, but I'm not interested to get into the problem of metaphysical evil in this series of posts. It's not something that interests me very much.
So let's get back to Harris's problem with creedal claims which he believes have no plausible basis. In his post to Sullivan, he recounts an experience he had in a particular "room" triggered by a visit he made to the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee:
As I sat and gazed upon the surrounding hills gently sloping to an inland sea, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self-an "I" or a "me"-vanished. Everything was as it had been-the cloudless sky, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water-but I no longer felt like I was separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.
The experience lasted just a few moments, but returned many times as I gazed out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly interpret this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God, or felt the descent of the Holy Spirit. But I am not a Christian. If I were a Hindu, I might talk about "Brahman," the eternal Self, of which all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. But I am not a Hindu. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the "dharmakaya of emptiness" in which all apparent things manifest. But I am not a Buddhist.
Come now, gentle Harrisites, where is that intellectual rigor you are always talking about? If it's true that there are many rooms, I'm sure you can agree that it would not be fair for Harris or anyone to generalize from his limited experience of one room to say that all the rooms in the house are the same as the one he visited. And if you accept that, it shouldn't be that hard to accept that the kind of vague transcendentalism that many people embrace in response to experiences like the one Harris describes is not the kind of thing upon which Christianity is based, the site of his experience nothwithstanding. It's like your listening to Miles Davis and assuming that my experience of Beethoven is the same thing. It's the fallacy of "You heard one tune, you heard 'em all."
I'm probably belaboring an obvious point here, but I want to be clear about it. There are lots of experiences of transcendence and quite a few of them are not at all related to the particular Christian experience of it. And so therefore such experiences have no relevance in proving or disproving the creedal assertions of Christianity or any other religion. So I agree with the Harrisites on that point, but I make different inferences from it.
I would also say that while some people claim to have experiences of the transcendent, they are often mistaken in the interpretation they give it or to the importance they ascribe to it. It's easy to be deluded, and of course, there are phonies and charlatans. But not everyone or even most people who claim to have such experiences are phonies, charlatans, or to use Harris's term, liars. Any single person's experience is insufficient to base much of anything on, but particular experiences which have similarities to the experiences of others, especially if these experiences are recounted by credible sources from different places and different times, should at least pique the open-minded atheist's curiosity as to what they are about. Do you doubt that satori is a place many Zen Buddhists have gone? How do you know there is such place? Only by the reports of those who have been there. I may not want to go there or make the effort to go, but I certainly have no doubt that it exists.
That they have been there is not scientifically provable, but these reports have a validity similar to the validity of reports of different travelers who have been to a foreign country you've never been to whose accounts reinforce one another. People who doubt the accounts of so many credible Christian witnesses over two thousand years are in my mind very similar to those who think that the moon landing was a hoax. The only thing that would convince them would be if they were themselves someday to set foot on the moon.
And so whatever judgments atheists might make about the validity and meaning of the experience these various people describe, the open-minded atheist at least owes them a fair hearing. But if we agree that such experiences can be authentic, can we also agree that the people in the best position to interpret them are those who have had the experience? Surely their attempts to articulate what they mean are recognized as inadequate by anyone, most especially by those who make the attempt. But anybody with a good b.s. detector can tell who is speaking about something deep and true and who is just prattling pious formulas. Surely whatever any given individual's or community's understanding of the meaning of such experiences might be, the reality of them exceeds all human attempts to grasp them in their entirety.
The title of one of Thomas Merton's books, Raids on the Unspeakable, captures the idea well. The attempt to speak about the unspeakable is worth making, but the result is always inadequate to the reality about which it speaks. And I would say that the Gospels and Epistles of St. Paul are such raids on the unspeakable. Yes, they do have a particular kind of authority, but to think of them as anything other than texts that attempt to put into words experiences of events that surpass any human's understanding by cosmic degrees of magnitude leads to all kinds of reductionist silliness, fundamentalism being one, demythologization another. Nothing in these documents is univocal or simplistically prescriptive. They are first and foremost artifacts that invite their readers into an alternative, upside-down experience of reality.
I would argue that all sacred texts need to be approached as sacraments, if we understand sacraments to be inspired human creations that move us from the doorstep into the big house to which I referred earlier. And I would say that sacramental texts or any sacramental objects or rituals operate sacramentally to the degree that they draw you from the outside into the inside, from a small world into a larger world. They are otherwise just fetish objects. The gospels and epistles are one of several portals into rooms in the Christian "house". I'm not interested to make the judgment about whether one set of rooms in the house is better than any other set. To do so almost always leads to smug, ignorant assertions. I only want to stress that there are such rooms and that they are different. And, of course, "rooms" are metaphors for subjectively experienced states of consciousness in which certain kinds of cognitions on non-subjective, or perhaps more accurately, inter-subjective phenomena are possible. I'll try to make what I mean by that clearer as we go along.
Sacraments have the characteristics of ordinary objects or behaviors. Many people see just the object, but have never experienced how they function as portals into a "subjective" experience of the transcendent reality to which it points. It's understandable that many people, rather than to accept its invitation to go into a larger world or experience, seek to reduce it to terms that make sense in their comfortable smaller world.
Sometimes the only way to get out of the little world into the bigger world is to take the proverbial leap of faith. This leap is perhaps an overly dramatic metaphor. I like better the biblical recommendation to knock on the door. For the leaping is really first a choice to knock, and then should the door open, another choice to enter, and after that, well, if the experience is authentic, there is an encounter of some sort that, depending on the intensity of the encounter, has this way of turning your life upside down. This encounter, experienced in a variety of ways, is the central Christian experience.
Many more Christians have had this experience than have written about it, but some of the most articulate among many, many others are St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, Pascal, and more recently Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. It's sometimes called a conversion experience, but I think of its essential nature as being an "encounter". And at the risk of alienating my Harrisite readers, I understand these encounters as not identical with but similar to the encounters with the post-resurrection Christ the disciples reported, some of which are recorded in the New Testament.
I would argue that similar encounters have been repeatedly experienced by Christians through the centuries and have been the source of Christianity's longevity. Not everybody has it in a way they are conscious of, but enough people have it with varying degrees of clarity or intensity to make its essential characteristics recognizable. If there is no zen without satori, there is no Christianity without this ecnounter with the risen Christ. As there are many levels of satori, so are there many levels of encounter with the Christ.
Such encounters through the centuries have kept Christianity from shriveling into a zombie religion, a religion that has the form of the real thing, but which is animated by some alien force that has little to do with the spirit of Christianity. This kind of counterfeit Christianity--as we see it in the pseudo Christianity of Dobson, Fallwell and Robertson--is a reality, and it is scary. And it might be hard for outsiders to distinguish it from the real thing, but the difference is very apparent to insiders.
I ask the Harrisites among you, if you are still reading, to suspend for a few more moments your disbelief or your bias that the New Testament accounts of these encounters with the risen Christ were all a fairy tale created by the early church to support their collective delusion. Can we agree on at least this much: around two thousand years ago something happened. The early disciples didn't really understand it. They simply reported what they experienced. Their lives were turned upside down by it. They started acting in countercultural ways that caused them a lot of grief, and eventually, the seeming absurdity of those accounts became the accepted metanarrative of the West--and I would argue still is. If nothing else, the very implausibility of this strange little sect with such a ridiculous story having such profound impact when there were so many other more attractive possibilities should give one pause.
Could it, in fact, all be a collective delusion? Collective delusions are fairly common. They took hold of France in the 1790s, Russia in the teens and twenties, Germany in the thirties, China in the sixties, the current neoconservative and Christianist right in the U.S., and endless examples can be produced. But collective delusions sooner or later collapse. They don't sustain themselves for two thousand years. If nothing else that's got to earn Christians enough credibility to get a fair hearing, and that requires listening to what they say about their experience rather than just dismissing it or reducing it to terms that fit comfortably into rationalist cubbies.
Harrisites, are you really completely confident that you know better than some of the best minds and great souls who have lived throughout the past 2000 years? It would be fair for you to say that their experience is not your experience. But to dismiss it so glibly as Harris and others do is facetiously parochial and callow.
That's enough for now. There's more to say about how the world looks from inside the Christian suite of rooms, and that involves some discussion of the particularities of Christian belief. I'll make my best attempt to do that soon in a Part III.