The morning after posting last month’s blog I was reading Avraham Gileadi’s The Book of Isaiah: A New Translation with Interpretive Keys from the Book of Mormon on my way to work. I had ended the post by commenting on Stephen Mitchell’s claim that ecstatic experiences are common to all cultures and can be produced given the right conditions of sensory deprivation and deep concentration. I suggested that perhaps Mark had another rhetorical purpose in the baptismal story than trying to show a spectacular sign of Jesus’ divinity, so that was on my mind when I read Gileadi’s comment about how Isaiah begins by calling heaven and earth as witnesses:
Maybe that’s what Mark is doing, I thought, calling on heaven and earth as witnesses, or declaring them as witnesses, and indeed he quotes Isaiah and Malachi to open his gospel. We can see heaven and earth in call and response in Matthew and Luke as well, and John goes beyond the birth of Jesus, back to the beginning.
If Isaiah’s words are a trope or rhetorical convention the Evangelists’ opening scenes are words made flesh.
No they’re not, I can hear Stephen Mitchell say, they’re stories created by the early Christian church to embody the mythic truths of their worldview, which is quite separate from Jesus’s central teaching, “The kingdom of God is within you.”
As Mitchell says, “sky opening, heavenly voice acknowledging Jesus as the divine Son” are heavily mythological elements. If I try to tease out the logic behind Mitchell’s comment I get something like this: These are elements common to ancient mythology, therefore when we come across stories that have these elements we need to read them mythically or metaphorically, not literally.
But maybe “A uses the elements of B so A must be a variant of B” is not Mitchell’s logic. Consider the same logical pattern from a different angle. The stories of Adam and Eve and the Flood tell us cultures had a common ancestry which passed down the origin stories to their descendants. (The fact that the Jewish story of the Flood is much younger than, say, Gilgamesh’s flood needn’t mean the Israelites got their stories from the older cultures, only that the written versions we have from them were written down later.) These origin stories include divine beings making themselves known to human beings. The stories of these making knowns were handed down and people used the patterns of those stories when they wanted to recount their own stories of the divine, or create stories that mimicked the divine pattern.
So when we see stories that follow the divine pattern of the stories handed down from our first parents we should see the stories as types and look at the mythological elements as metaphors for personal encounters with divine beings.
I doubt Mitchell would find my reasoning convincing. He might even say he’s only reasoning from common sense, that it is not the common experience to hear voices from heaven saying “Thou art my beloved Son,” but it is a common experience among shamanic and religious traditions everywhere to induce “visions, revelations, prophecies, ecstasies, experiences of being caught up . . . [through] the proper conditions of sensory deprivation of religious fervor or concentration” (130).
Granted. But does that mean that all ecstatic experiences are induced through sensory deprivation, fervor, or concentration? Consider Reynolds Price’s insight that the body is our organ of knowledge, that all knowledge comes to us through our bodies, and that the biblical descriptions of divine encounters are palpable and physical, not abstract.
All knowledge comes to us through the body, but the body is not simply a prism that knowledge shines through, it is a repository for that knowledge and experience, including our knowledge of other people. We can talk to a friend or family member and see them in front of us, but they don’t need to be present for us to see them clearly.
In the condition of sensory alteration we call sleep we can create clear pictures of anything that’s ever happened to us, and even things that haven’t. And these pictures can have effects upon our bodies, especially pictures erotic or horrific.
In his memoir Clear Pictures, Reynolds Price talks about working with a doctor on biofeedback and hypnosis techniques to relieve three years of back pain. At the end of their sessions he asked the doctor about using hypnosis to excavate his earliest memories. The doctor cautioned him that the memories would come back with the same emotional force they had at the time he experienced them, not as recollected in the tranquility of adulthood (p. 8).
If the body can store clear pictures and produce clear pictures of people long dead how do we know that the people standing in front of us are not simply being produced by our bodies, and not by outside stimuli coming to our body from other sources? Let me phrase the question a different way. If we insist that ecstatic spiritual experiences originate in the body because the body can produce them given the right conditions, what physiological basis do we have for saying that the experiences we have with other people originate outside our bodies?
If we can accept that our knowledge of others comes from outside of our bodies, originates in other people and not in ourselves, why is it so difficult to accept encounters with divine beings as experiences with other beings who are as palpable as we are?
I’m not going to push on this question just now, but I will say that both The Gospel According to Jesus and its young adult abridgment, Jesus: What He Really Said and Did, give me the strong sense that for Stephen Mitchell the kingdom of God is an idea, somewhere within us, which also makes God a useful idea, but not a person.
Let me suggest that Jesus was not the honorary Zen Buddhist Mitchell wants him to be, but a Jew raised in a palpable covenant tradition, a covenant tradition centered in place and palpable divine beings, not in ideas. I’m not sure other Jews shared his sense of God’s palpability, and that may be what some of the debates with the Pharisees and Saduccees are about.
More about this next month. In the meantime, your turn.
We all have a heavy investment in seeing things from the perspective of our own experience. Anything that isn’t a part of that experience (based on our own interpretation of that experience) gives us no basis for interpretation as to likelihood. Those who have not experienced dreams and visions, or at least known those who have, don’t have any basis for determining credibility, which is yet one more reason for spiritual teachers to insist that the seeker after truth must personally experience something in order to understand the message.
Have you read Steve Peck’s book, Evolving Truth? It covers some of this same territory, both from his perspective as a biologist and in terms of personal experience. Not to mention the fact that both of you are crazy men who I think would get along great…
I’m reminded as well of Tolkien’s explanation to Lewis that the sacrificial Jesus he had so much trouble accepting was very much like the mythological Baldr Lewis loved, except that it *actually happened.* Biographer Humphrey Carpenter identifies this as a key insight that helped formerly atheist Lewis to move from believing in God to specifically believing in Christ.
Thanks, Jonathan. In light of the recent Olympics I should mention that the ancient Greeks weren’t the only ones to have a distance run. The Norse had one even earlier, the Baldrdash.
There’s also that intriguing moment in Perelandra where Ransom wonders whether stories we experience as myths might have actually happened on other planets. Of course, Ransom travels to Perelandra to witness, and intervene in, a replaying of the Adam and Eve story. But despite his name Ransom is not a sacrificial victim, he’s closer to Ender Wiggin officiating at the altar at the end of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead.
“If we can accept that our knowledge of others comes from outside of our bodies, originates in other people and not in ourselves, why is it so difficult to accept encounters with divine beings as experiences with other beings who are as palpable as we are?”
Great question. I think one reason Christianity and the gospels have resisted over-mystification is that they insist, rather plainly, on tangible reality of the miracles and visions. The gospels are very this-worldly. (Somewhere C.S. Lewis says the gospel writers were prosaic Jews who had no flair for the mythical like the Greeks.) Which is also why Mormonism has resisted explanations of its founding miracles as symbolic or metaphorical. It’s hard to relegate things to metaphor when a bunch of guys are standing around looking at golden plate and describing the experience in as plain and straightforward language as possible.
Thanks for your comment Sheldon. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. My first reaction is that Christians have been pretty good at spiritualizing the Gospels. But I also recall a scene where one of the Narnians is trying to explain that Aslan is not a real lion, you see. When people say Aslan is a lion they mean he’s like a lion. He has the courage of a lion, the majesty of a lion. All the while he’s saying this Aslan is sneaking up behind him, then pounces and begins tickling him.
I’ve never been quite sure how to take this. Clearly Lewis is lampooning the arguments people use to argue why we shouldn’t take all the scriptural images of an embodied God literally, but does he believe in an embodied God, or is he just making an affectionate spoof of his religious beliefs?
Any thoughts?