MIRACLES, MYSTERIES, MYTHS & METAPHORS
Jerry Harkins

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
—Karl Marx



Throughout the world and throughout history, religion has been the most revealing signifier of culture. There is nothing that so accurately describes a people as the way they interact with their sense of the divine. Even in contemporary America, characterized as it is by diversity, modernism, materialism, individualism and show-me empiricism, the dominant religious values exercise a powerful influence on both public and private attitudes and behavior. The “dominant” religion of a religion-mad America is a highly selective and diluted form of Christianity. Ninety-one percent of us believe in God and 82% or nearly 250 million identify ourselves as Christians. The United States is, by far, the most religiously observant developed nation with 43% of the population attending services at least weekly. Yet, a number of ironies stand out. As a rule, we know and care next to nothing about the history, philosophy, or theology of the Christian church and have only the most stereotypical views about religions other than the one practiced by our own congregation. There is probably not a single theological or even ethical proposition that a majority of American Christians would agree on in depth. For example, virtually all would say that Jesus is the son of God but there would be no common understanding of exactly what that means. For the first 400 years, Christology was a vital issue relentlessly disputed by both bishops and their congregations. There were proponents of every conceivable position: the Arians, the Docetists and Gnostics of every description. For us, though, “son of God” is enough. We are unaware that the phrase might mean very different things to different theologians. We do not care.

Americans are so committed to the idea that the Bible is the inerrant word of God that only 23% of weekly churchgoers accept the theory of evolution. Five hundred years after Galileo, 20% of us still think the sun revolves around the earth. Maybe I should say “only 20%” believe such nonsense, that fully 80% of us know better. But sunrise and sunset are among the first scientific truths we teach children about, never failing to make the point that appearances are not always what they seem. Some children, however, are told that the Bible says something different, that in the First Book of Chronicles, King David says, “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” They continue to believe it not because they are stupid or even credulous but because they are uninterested in challenging what they take as a Biblical precept. We practice Christianity Lite. Our national faith is closer to Norman Vincent Peale than to John Calvin.

Neither is ours the Christianity of the gospels—the “good news” taught by Jesus Christ. Yes, Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” “Fulfill” though means to bring to completion. Paul struggled with this because he believed Christ had liberated us from the Law. “It is,” he told the Galatians, “for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.” In fact, the theology of the New Testament is both simple and complex. On the one had, it is nothing more than what Andrew Greeley calls God’s “implacable” love for us. On the other, it is the rabbinic complexity of the 29 metaphors we call parables which allow and demand extensive, subtle explication. But our preachers rarely concern themselves with either, preferring to dwell on what they consider sin. Theirs is a religion of rules, ours of emotions.

Our attitudes toward homosexuality, a subject the founder never addressed, are one evidence of the resulting discontinuity. Americans are not nearly as rigid as one might assume from listening to most preachers. Their views are by no means nuanced but they are confused and equivocal, and they are changing fairly rapidly. Recent polls suggest that a plurality of about 43% of Americans believe “gay” is an unacceptable “lifestyle” and 35% think it should be illegal. Again, maybe I should say that significant majorities do not believe such nonsense. As a matter of fact, very large majorities say that gays should have equal economic rights, should be allowed to serve in the military and should be permitted to influence health care decisions regarding their partners. But an even larger majority is strongly opposed to gay marriage and a substantial minority opposes even civil unions. Overall, in political terms, America still has to be classified as anti-gay if only because the opponents are more motivated to vote. And the religion preached from their pulpits is at the root of their negative attitudes. There is no science, no logic and no historical experience informing gender bias. It is entirely a remnant of the taboos of an ancient, small, often besieged community struggling with the issue of survival on a day-to-day basis. The Bible instructs us to kill homosexuals who refuse to honor the community’s first priority which is to be fruitful and multiply. Preachers who denounce homosexuality as an abomination are quoting Leviticus and following Paul but without the Bible’s social or moral context. Their harangues are intellectually empty and out of touch with the rich if confusing fabric of public opinion.

Americans can safely ignore the inanities of the likes of Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps. But they cannot avoid the more basic question about the relevance of religion two centuries after the French statistician Pierre-Simon Laplace told Napoleon there was no longer a need for the God hypothesis and when, in fact, according to Nietzsche, God has been dead for some time. At the beginning of the third millennium, we humans are coming close to the Rosetta Stone of theoretical physics, the so-called theory of everything. Already, cosmologists have developed what appears to be an accurate understanding of the forces at work when the universe was only three-trillionths of a second old and its physics was still dominated by the Big Bang. Success in this may render God technically unnecessary but by no means impossible or useless. The existence of God is not a matter for physics or physics knowledge. It is not a question of how big God is or how much he or she weighs. We are dealing here with the idea of God. The idea of God is independent of physics and is very real. Whatever happens, religious people should not allow themselves to be forced into rejecting physics as so many of them now reject biology.

The power of religion over the minds of people is so strong that it has been advanced as one proof for the existence of God which is circular but oddly attractive logic. Freud thought religion is an illusion that derives its strength from its ability to complement our most basic instinctual needs. William James uses the word religion to refer to, “…the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” Young children, staring at the stars in a dark summer sky, experience the immensity of the universe and their own insignificance and wonder about what happened before and what might happen after. This is the awesome sense of religion James captures in his reference to solitude. But awe is only part of the power. Religion brings comfort, security and joy or at least it alleviates pain, fear and sadness. Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyment lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.”

From the earliest Christian martyrs to present-day suicide bombers, impressive numbers of people have been willing to undergo torture and death in the name of God. Others have been willing to participate in the most horrendous acts of mass murder to “protect” some subtle point of theology without needing to understand it. The soldiers who slaughtered an estimated 20,000 men women and children of Beziers, France on the morning of July 22, 1209 may have known that the Cathars refused to tithe to the church, but they had no knowledge of their Manichaean beliefs or the Cathar eschatology Pope Innocent III saw as a threat. For more than a thousand years, the Irish remained steadfast in their Catholic faith in spite of the church’s collusion with their English overlords and the abuse of their children by the clergy. Between 1525 and 1650, religious wars precipitated by the Reformation ravaged Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Ireland and Denmark. These were the first modern wars employing artillery on a large scale and they caused previously unimagined numbers of civilian deaths.

If, as Edward Gibbon wrote, history is, “…little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind,” it is also very largely the story of human misery committed in the name of God. And yet religion persists because, as William James points out, there is a vast difference between personal religion and institutional religion. “In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism.” It is at least arguable that the driving force of Western history—if there is such a thing—has been the struggle of the priestly class to seize the personal religious instinct, institutionalize it and use it to gain power. In this, they can never be entirely successful because personal religion will persevere even in the absence of literal belief. The gnosis—the hidden knowledge—of personal religion is something we all share. It is a universal that, in a sense, makes what is essentially personal into something communal thereby offering a full menu of existential comforts. The communal satisfactions of religion have little to do with bricks and mortar or theology or dogma. Some Christian sects have discarded entirely the ceremonial or liturgical trappings of the old faith, and some have come close to forsaking the divine itself. Harvey Cox, for one, thinks Christians have journeyed through the Age of Faith dominated by individual religion, the Age of Belief dominated by institutional religion and are now engaged in the Age of the Spirit which has no care for dogma but emphasizes spirituality. This transition is evident across the entire spectrum of Christianity but the most vulnerable part of the enterprise is the most orthodox, precisely the opposite of the condition of Judaism and Islam.

“Orthodox” Christianity is not Protestant fundamentalism which, with its focus on scripture, is only a pale reflection of the patristic tradition. Rather, orthodoxy refers to an institutional phenomenon: a mainstream of doctrine elaborated but preserved in its essentials and radiating from some starting point. The church would say Point Alpha is the gospel but a better claim would put it in the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo who essentially invented original sin and made salvation the almost impossible goal of life. That the church is the only source of salvation is very close to the heart of orthodoxy. Thus, when Luther taught that justification comes through faith alone, that idea, sola fide, was a revolution well outside the mainstream of historical Christianity. Orthodoxy elaborates but tries hard to resist real change. There is always the fear that, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “…if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness…Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.” What Chesterton disregarded is that, in the arena of personal religion, doctrine is virtually irrelevant.

Institutional Catholicism is the keeper of the orthodox doctrine and dogma of Christianity as well as the keys to the kingdom while personal Christianity deals in the miracles, mysteries, myths and metaphors of a much more generalized faith. Certainly the hierarchs would like to take control of the latter for themselves. The Shroud of Turin is a good example. For nearly 600 years, the Vatican essentially ignored it even as it became a popular object of worship for pilgrims. In 1988, scientists determined that it had been woven sometime between 1260 and 1390, making it preposterous to think it might have been Jesus’ burial shroud. The church became more cautious than ever. Speaking of its authenticity in 1998, Pope John Paul II said, “Since we're not dealing with a matter of faith, the church can't pronounce itself on such questions.” Nonetheless, on May 2, 2010, Benedict XVI prayed before the shroud, calling it, “…an icon written in blood; the blood of a man who has been flagellated, crowned with thorns, crucified and wounded in his right rib.” If an icon brings in the tourists, it seems, the pope is willing to kneel before it however improbable it may be.

Recent popes have also attempted to seize Mary and Marian devotion even to the extent of expropriating her title “Holy Mother” to the church itself. In 1854, Pius IX solemnly proclaimed that Mary had been conceived without the stain of original sin. In 1950, Pius XII further announced that she had been assumed bodily into heaven. Vatican theologians are currently advancing the idea that she is the Mediatrix of All Graces and, indeed, the Co-Redemptrix with Jesus. Who among the unannointed cares about such trivial pursuits? At the same time, though, the church has endorsed and promoted various apparitions of the Virgin including those to Catherine Labouré in 1830, Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 and Lucia Santos and her cousins in 1927. Lourdes and Fatima have become major pilgrimage sites complete with relics, curing waters and papal indulgences. All the leading players have been canonized, large cathedrals have been erected, and several Popes have displayed special devotion to the sites and relics of the apparitions. Still, official Mariology is a corporate phenomenon. Pilgrims arrive in tour groups led by their local pastors and the fervor is carefully orchestrated with hymns and prayers composed by professionals.

Mary, of course, has always been popular with Catholics representing, as she does, mother love and closeness to God. It is not therefore surprising that the Vatican, besieged by modernism and caught up in its own deceits, would want a close identification with and control over such a positive force. When, as in the case of Fatima, the Virgin appears as a source of continuing revelation, the church has an especially strong motivation to gain control.

Dozens of sites have claimed their own appearances and have become local and national pilgrimage sites. Several, notably Częstochowa in Poland and Guadalupe in Mexico have recently been caught up in the official Marian obsession but others retain the authentic folk-like flavor of medieval Irish holy wells and sacred sites such as Glastonbury. This “flavor” is spiced with elements of residual paganism and even hints of anti-institutional resistance. One example is the shrine of Saint Anne de Beaupré in Québec. Anne is the almost entirely mythical mother of the Virgin Mary and each year, thousands of pilgrims climb the steps of her basilica on their knees to pray in front of reliquaries containing three of her bones, two of which were donated by Popes Leo XIII and John XXIII. No apparitions have been reported but many cures have been effected and canes, crutches and wheelchairs have been left behind in large quantities. Her cult in Québec arose shortly after the city was founded in the seventeenth century possibly because many of the French mariners there had their origins in Bretagne which also claims Anne as its patron. The first cure was experienced in 1658 by one Louis Guimont who suffered from lumbago which disappeared as he placed a stone in the foundation of the first church on the site.

Anne presents the church with a common dilemma. She appears only in the apocryphal Gospel of James, the brother or half brother of Jesus, and the church has never accepted either the gospel or its purported author. Both, however, were extremely popular in the middle ages and James’ account of Anne, with its echoes of Abraham’s wife Sarah, was not only widely believed but became the seed for many folk extensions including the popular belief that, like her daughter, she was a virgin when she gave birth. The church does not want to embrace such folkish aspects of Anne. If she was a virgin mother, after all, she diminishes the miraculous nature of Jesus’ birth. But the institution is compelled to control a phenomenon that inspires such intense faith. What makes saints appeal to the personal religious beliefs of people—what inspires the pilgrim economy—are the mysteries and miracles described in the hagiographies. A moment’s reflection will lay bare the improbability of finding never mind identifying Anne’s bones or such other relics as blood from the side of Christ, milk from Mary’s breasts or the true cross. Similarly, Saint Brendan and his fellow mariners did not have Easter breakfast on the back of a whale in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Saint Bridget did not stop wars by making armies invisible to each other. Saint Nicholas may have been an exceedingly generous man but he did not raise three butchered children from the dead. Saint George never slew a dragon. More recently, Padre St. Pio (1887-1968) did not levitate while saying mass. But people need these saints as intermediaries with the divine and, as such, they are in direct competition with the institutional church. Their miracles are, ironically, the tokens of their credibility.

The church counters with its own official miracles which are more spectacular. For example, it teaches that the bread and wine of the eucharist are transformed by the incantations of the priest into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. Pope Paul VI wrote, “To avoid any misunderstanding of this type of presence, which goes beyond the laws of nature and constitutes the greatest miracle of its kind, we have to listen with docility to the voice of the teaching and praying Church. Her voice, which constantly echoes the voice of Christ, assures us that the way in which Christ becomes present in this Sacrament is through the conversion of the whole substance of the bread into His body and of the whole substance of the wine into His blood, a unique and truly wonderful conversion that the Catholic Church fittingly and properly calls transubstantiation.” Beyond the laws of nature. Greatest miracle of its kind. Listen with docility. This is a pure orthodox position, a view shared by virtually no Protestants. How many people think they are eating living flesh or drinking blood? The eucharist is a metaphor of incorporation, of the union of God and his creation and their mutual love. It is beautiful unto itself. But like all metaphors, it limps. Like all metaphors, it is prey to reductio ad absurdum. Why preach such absurdity? The answer seems obvious: the priestly caste wants to be seen as miracle workers who alone enjoy the awesome, nature-contradicting power of the Almighty.

Religion is one of the ways people have devised to help them in their quest for truth, beauty and harmony. It is important specifically because it helps them cope with the great but ineffable questions of life, the existential paradoxes, the singularity and ephemerality of experience—what Milan Kundera called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Religious truth is different in kind from experimental truth and cannot be measured by the same standards. Spirituality is nothing like Fermat’s Last Theorem or Newton’s Laws of Motion. It is not “true” or “false” or provable in any sense remotely like the theory of evolution or the theory of relativity. The Pythagorean Theorem can demand acceptance as something more than a definition. The “theory of everything” can recommend itself to us on the basis of probability. The divinity of Jesus can do neither. It can only ask for belief or faith. The idea of God may be compelling but the idea of the Trinity is purely mythological. One may enjoy the myth. One may learn from it. In itself, it is harmless but the attempt to seize upon it, to monopolize it and impose it and other dogmas upon others as a condition of salvation is as sociopathic as any other form of tyranny.