MR. ADAMS AND ME

Jerry Harkins

Let it be acknowledged at the outset that Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was one of the greatest of American photographers. His black and white landscapes are without peer and his portraits and still lifes are invariably revealing. His artistry combined a unique visual imagination with equally unique field and darkroom disciplines. Not everyone likes his images, the most famous of which tend to be too romantic for some. But everyone recognizes his genius, myself included.

There is, however, an artificial quality apparent in many of his landscapes as though he was trying to show the world not as it is but as it should be or might be if he were in charge. It is a quality that often inflates one’s first impression but that turns out to be superficial and, in the end, embarrassing. Take, for example, his signature image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.

Adams was driving south on what is now U.S. 84 after what he called a “discouraging” day in the Chama Valley. Around 4:00 PM he came upon the scene and instantly visualized it as a photograph. He very quickly set up his 8 X 10 view camera but could not find a light meter. Fortunately, “I suddenly realized I knew the luminance of the moon—250 c/ft2. [1] Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII; 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor of 3X was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.” [2] Even so, the negative proved very difficult to print in a way that would yield something close to his visualization. The concept and the physics were so out of whack that every important factor had to be manipulated in the darkroom. He burned and he dodged. He experimented with various developer-to-water sequences and was still working on it several years later, re-fixing and re-washing the negative and treating the lower section with a dilute solution of Kodak IN-5 intensifier.

He actually knew the luminance of the moon! Are you properly dazzled? Of course you are—at least until you start thinking about it. To begin with, Adams may have imagined the scene as it appears on the print, but the reality was very different. The sky was not black. It was 55 minutes before sunset. The sky was still blue, probably light blue, and the clouds were probably beginning to glow red. He was using a deep yellow filter (Wratten No. 15G) which darkened the sky without affecting the green in the shrubbery. The filter did not, however, render the sky black. We do not need to guess how much grayer it became because, in the end, it was the contrast between the sky and the clouds and the sky and the moon that Adams was interested in. He says the clouds were “two or three times as bright as the moon” which may be true but both were bathed in the light of the sun. And neither was made brighter by the filter which darkened them slightly if anything. The contrast in the print is wrong. The crosses in the cemetery were no brighter than the wall of the structure behind them or the rear wall of the church on the left, and the vegetation in the foreground was not nearly so dark. Overall, the contrast, on which the impact of the image is totally dependent, was nowhere near as high as it is in the prints.

What you have here is a striking photograph that was made almost entirely in the mind of the photographer. The camera, for all the technical talk, was incidental. I suspect a pin camera would have done as well or almost as well. I have no objection to this. Nor do I have a problem with the photographer’s visualization any more than I do with Picasso’s three-headed mistress. I really don’t care about the tensile strength of Picasso’s palate knife or even the dimensions of his brushes even if the artist thinks I need to know it. In the present case, we are dealing with what was in the artist’s head and what the results communicate to the rest of us.

Moonrise is the story of a very particular moment which is not the moment it was taken, but some moment the real moment inspired in the photographer. Whatever else it is, it is a night story, a midnight story: The pitch black sky hovers ominously over everything, occupying more than half of the image area. The laws of nature are suspended. Not even the light of the nearly full moon brightens that imaginary sky (just as the real moon did not an hour before sunset). The clouds and the grave markers are lit. We know intellectually their glow comes from the sun but that knowledge plays no part in the psychological impact of the image. It is a night image. Anything glowing must have its own internal source of light. The feeling is eerie and maybe a little scary. This is surrealism masquerading as realism or, perhaps, romanticism. The important thing, though, is that Adams visualized it all while riding along gazing out a car window—or maybe not. Maybe it was similar to William Wordsworth’s observation that, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In Adams’ case, the tranquility was in the darkroom which, arguably, is where he “discovered” the photograph.

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome is another image made mainly in the darkroom. Taken in early afternoon on April 17, 1927, it is almost as surrealistic as Moonrise. Once again, the dark sky was created mainly in the lab. (A yellow filter again contributed to this.) The shadow on the right of the monolith is hard to explain. According to Adams, at noon the monolith was in full shadow. Nearly a month after the equinox, that’s hard to believe but, two hours later, the sun was slightly lower in the sky. This calls attention to what seems to be a shadow consisting of two shades of gray while the formation in the lower right hand corner seems to be in full sunlight. Moreover, the shadows of the trees on that formation suggest the sun is at the right rear of the picture. Why then is the right side of the monolith still in deep if not full shadow? The precisely perpendicular border of the shadow divides the image into two parts, light and dark. The same precision also suggests the line was created by a poor job of burning.

This is an early image and, unlike Moonrise, it seems to have no meaning or message beyond being a generic pretty picture. [3] Adams was attached to it, he says, because it was the first time his visualization was realized exactly in the final print. But what visualization? Is he talking about “visualizing” a perfectly straight line dividing the picture in two? I think not. This was a hard picture to take if what caught his eye was the texture of the monolith. My guess is that is precisely what Adams wanted to show and he was elated when he saw he had succeeded. Once again, I suspect his “visualizations” come largely or wholly after the fact, not before it.

Sand Dunes, Sunrise is one of the master’s greatest photographs. It is not at all romantic, although, like Moonrise, it conveys an unsettling mood. It is a hard-edged, almost abstract image taken near Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley in 1948. Unlike Moonrise, this was carefully planned well in advance and, this time, what you see is pretty much the scene as it actually was. The lab work is incidental. Here you see what happens when the process of visualization unfolds pretty much as Adams describes it. He knew in advance that the contrasts on the dunes at sunrise would create a metaphor for the feeling one experiences at moments of high anticipation.

The few minutes just before and just after the sun comes up over the horizon are what Maya Angelou called the “pulse of morning.” [4] During that brief interval, the temperature drops noticeably. In summer, the birds have been singing for about a half hour but now they pause. The wind, if there is any, freshens. If it is calm, a breeze comes up. Experiencing this tiny drama, an observer senses both the possibilities and the uncertainties of a new day. What Adams has done is to re-create these feelings using a straightforward image of a range of shades of gray with just enough context to prod the viewer. You know this is a real landscape, not an abstraction. The photographer took special care to reveal the sand ripples at the bottom of the image in what appears to be an opening in the earth. The ripples are what cues you that the scene is real. Moreover, I believe, they speak to the transience of both the moment and its meaning (although I am not oblivious to the shape of that opening). This is a beautiful image and, if I am right about its meaning, it is also a brilliant one. It is not necessary that Adams’ visualization include my “pulse of morning” analysis, only that his emotional state be consistent with it. The artist feels what the critic then tries to put into words.

Mirror Lake is one of several Adams images of the large lake-like widening in the Merced River about a mile from the trailhead behind the Ahwahnee Hotel. The fullness of the lake tells us this must have been springtime. The brightest light seems to be coming from the upper right. Assuming it is morning, the camera then is looking north. [5] It seems that little or nothing was done to change what the lens saw and it may be that Adams did not even use a filter. In other words, this is an objective photograph in the ordinary sense of the word. What he saw is pretty much what you get. Which brings us to a central problem: just exactly what is Adams trying to do?

Along with other giants of American photography in the 1920’s and 30’s, Adams thought and wrote a great deal about the medium, trying to establish an identity for it as part of the cultural scene. Naturally there were competing schools of thought and disagreements were intense. In 1934, Adams wrote, “Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality. The photographer who thoroughly comprehends his medium visualizes his subject [as] a thing-in-itself.” [6] And Mirror Lake is objective for the most part. [7] So are his portraits and still lifes—in some cases they are painfully objective.

Joyce Yuki Nakamura, Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942 is a thoroughly objective picture of a pretty little girl, obviously of Japanese descent but with the long curly hair and Peter Pan collar speaking of American acculturation. A viewer must inevitably enjoy the image because it is so cloyingly cute. It is not until you realize that the child is an internee in a U.S. concentration camp that you experience any strong emotional reaction. You may then read meaning into several aspects of the picture, the lopsided smile, the partial closure of the right eye, the fancy blouse.

Contrast the portrait of Joyce Yuki Nakamura with the thoroughly non-objective photograph of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay by Berenice Abbott. Millay was a true Greenwich Village bohemian known as much for her voracious bisexual exploits as for her exquisitely sensitive poetry. The image is meant, I think, to highlight the latter and Abbott has posed it brilliantly with the man tailored shirt and tie contrasting sharply with the distant expression on the subject’s face. The same expression appears in many Millay pictures including the famous one of the 22-year old poet under a dogwood tree at Vassar by Arnold Genthe. But it is rare to see her teeth and the slight overbite that suggests vulnerability. The clincher is the knee that tells you she is wearing a skirt. The apparently masculine suit is a façade, a suit, if you will, of armor. Abbott always included the knee in the prints she made. Other darkroom technicians did not, thereby unbalancing the composition and betraying its meaning.

The difference between the two photographs is stark; the meaning of Joyce Yuki is totally dependent on the words of its title and the viewer has to know what a “relocation center” is. The meaning of the Millay portrait is entirely in the photograph. It requires no words. It may help to know who the subject was but, possibly, words would actually detract from the meaning. It is as much a product of the photographer’s conscious planning and intelligence as Moonrise or Sand Dunes and every bit as successful.

As acknowledged in the first sentence, Adams is among the greatest of American photographers. He is also the best known. Twenty-six years after his death, both his coffee table books and his technical works remain best sellers and a print of Moonrise recently sold at auction for $360,000, almost 90 times the price of an Abbott print. He deserves the gratitude of those of us who enjoy his work and those of us who try to learn from it. At the same time, it does no harm to acknowledge with Professor Harold Hill that there is a fine line between magic and flim-flam and that Mr. Adams was a masterful practitioner of both.

Notes

1. Candela per square foot. Until 1948, the measure of luminosity varied but was based on a specified candle or flame. Today it is defined as the luminous intensity (the amount of light emitted or reflected), in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 X 1012 hertz (a yellowish green) and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian. (A steradian is a standardized cone-shaped solid emanating from the center of a sphere and, thus, a pin source of light. There are 12.5664 steradians in a sphere.) In other words, luminosity is the brightness of light and is independent of the source’s context, in this case, the sky. The source in Moonrise is the sun the light of which is reflected by the moon. The moon is a tiny fraction of a sterdian so its radiant intensity is a tiny fraction of 1/683 watts. What is more interesting is that business about c/ft2 falling on Zone 5. I’m not expert in Adams’ zone system but it seems a long way from 250 (Zone 7) to 60 (Zone 5) to an exposure factor of 3X with his Wrattan No. 15 (G) filter to the actual exposure. Especially if the 250 is wrong (I suspect he misplaced a decimal point and the actual figure should be 2,500). Adams of course was not the first or last great artist to bullshit people about what he did. Nor was he unaware of what he called “the compelling impulse of photographers…to discuss equipment and materials…down to the smallest detail.” It’s the fine line between the detail and the bullshit that gave him trouble.

2. Adams, Ansel, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Little, Brown and Co., 1983, p. 41. I’m not sure about that ASA 64. The American Standards Association (now the American National Standards Institute) did not get into photographic standards until after 1946 so my theory is he meant to say “an ASA equivalent of 64.” That would imply a fairly fast film for the time but still agonizingly slow given that both the earth and the moon were moving.

3. Even though Half Dome is the definitive image of Yosemite, this picture could have been taken anywhere. Nothing jumps out and says Yosemite or Half Dome. Adams, of course, had climbed the Dome frequently and knew it intimately. Thus, he recognized this face of it but did not bother to communicate that to the rest of us except in the title he gave it.

4. “On The Pulse Of Morning,” Delivered January 20, 1993 at the Inauguration of President Clinton.

5. There are several untestable hypotheses here. It may be that I have invented the evidence to support a preconceived opinion about the air being not nearly as clear in the afternoon.

6. From an article titled “An exposition of my photographic technique” quoted in Eisinger Joel, Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period, University of New Mexico Press, 1995 p. 68.

7. The main exception is the reflection of the tall tree in the center of the image. The tree itself is without detail, its reflection is highly detailed—exactly the opposite of what you might expect. The water at that point is considerably brighter than the sky which suggests that Adams made it brighter specifically to bring out the detail. Not any easy thing to do.

The photographs discussed in this essay are all readily available on the internet and have been omitted here for copyright reasons and because they need to be seen in a size larger than possible here.

HEAVEN HELP US
Jerry Harkins

If you want to get to heaven, let me tell you what to do,
You gotta grease your feet in a little mutton stew.
Slide right out of the devil's hand,
And ease over to the Promised Land.
Take it easy! Go greasy!
—Woody Guthrie, Talking Blues


We are all children of God and heirs of heaven. But the journey is long and the path rocky that leads to salvation. For many are called but few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and hard is the way which leads to life, and there are few who will find it.

Of course it helps to have a map. Or know someone who does.

Sunday, May 1, 2011 was a sad day in the long and depressing history of the Roman Catholic church. In an elaborate spectacle of pomp and pageantry, the Pope kissed a vial of blood entwined in a filigreed reliquary. The blood had been taken from his immediate predecessor Karol Józef Wojtyła, John Paul II, and the kiss was part of his beatification ritual. The church was proclaiming that the late Pope is certainly in heaven and was encouraging the faithful to pray to him to intercede with God for their intentions. It had already certified that John Paul was responsible for at least one miracle, the cure of a French nun from Parkinson’s Disease of which the late Pope had himself been a victim.

According to an ABC News poll conducted in 2005, 90% of Americans said they believe in heaven. Amazon.com currently lists 4,410 books on the subject including several with the title Heaven Is Real or some close variation thereof. One, currently No. 6 on Amazon’s list of bestsellers, tells the story of a four-year old boy, Colton Burpo, who visited heaven while under anesthesia.[1] He returned with descriptions of what he encountered and with the message that the end times are near.

In fact, in almost all religious traditions, an afterlife of one sort or another is the very purpose of earthly life. In Christianity, the New Testament is almost entirely an instruction manual on how to avoid hell and get to heaven. In the words of the old Baltimore Catechism, “God made us to know, love and serve him on this earth and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” Jesus repeatedly stressed heaven as the goal of life and taught his listeners how they must live in order to achieve it. He went so far as to instruct them not to worry about their earthly needs but to seek first the father’s kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33). [2] The instructions varied over the three years of his ministry but the simplest was merely to believe in him. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31).

Christians have always taken an expansive view of “believe,” maintaining that it includes absolute obedience to a long list of moral precepts, only a handful of which were ever endorsed by the founder. Jesus, for example, never addressed such major taboos as abortion, birth control or in vitro fertilization, and never bothered with such lesser (Protestant) offenses as card playing, dancing and coffee drinking. The Catholic Church claimed the right to expand on Jesus’ teaching and said it was the exclusive gatekeeper of heaven. The Protestant reformers saw this as a gambit for gathering power and riches for a corrupt hierarchy and they preached a return to the doctrine of sola fide—salvation or “justification” by faith alone. We are all sinners and none of us can earn salvation merely through good works.

In the Smalcald Articles, Martin Luther wrote, “All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.” This implies that salvation is easy, that in fact everyone is saved, but it was not Luther’s last word on the subject. He and the others also contrived to believe the teaching of St. Augustine that very few human beings actually go to heaven and, in fact, that God has predestined every person from the beginning of time to heaven or hell. Luther himself understood that predestination raises many uncomfortable questions about the nature of God but he accepted these as mysteries and basically ignored them. John Calvin, on the other hand, embraced the notion that the vast majority of people had been doomed to eternal damnation before the creation of the universe.

If all this reminds you of the Mega Millions Lottery, it is because the psychology is similar. You buy a ticket which costs you relatively nothing but gives you a preposterously long shot at winning indescribable riches. You are buying into a dream and deriving pleasure from anticipating what you will do with the jackpot. There are, however, a number of differences. In one of these games, the house knows who the winners will be before the first ticket is sold. (In the other game, such knowledge would put the sponsor in jail.) In one, the losers are not left free to try and try again but are immediately and permanently banished to hell. Of course you are still free to purchase indulgences promising forgiveness of your sins but indulgences apply only to earthly punishments imposed by the church and purgatorial punishments imposed by God. They will not keep you or get you out of hell which is, in all probability, your destination.

The church has long been aware that its teachings regarding heaven and hell are inconsistent, illogical and embarrassing. On the one hand, it cannot avoid promoting the good news that God loves even sinners. On the other hand, it is obvious that an omniscient God must foresee all things and will their existence. Thus, God must will that some, perhaps the vast majority, of his beloved creatures suffer eternal damnation. Similarly, a creature without free will cannot sin but one with free will is independent of God’s will and, presumably, of God’s foreknowledge. Finally, a church with total power to bind and loose things on heaven and earth must also be a monopoly. And in fact, the church teaches that outside itself there is no salvation. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. In the words of the 1993 Catholic Catechism, “…all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body.” The metaphor of something passing from the head through the body need not detain us. Apologists try desperately to suggest that non-Catholics who would want to be part of the church if only they knew about it can somehow gain heaven. Which is the opposite of what John (3:5) says Jesus said: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” But the gospels are full of ambiguity on this as on many other subjects.

The early fathers and doctors who decided which books constituted the New Testament left out some interesting candidates and included others that are really strange. By the early years of the fourth century, they had pretty much agreed on the twenty-seven books found in modern bibles. What emerged were three versions of the new faith. The first of these, the original orthodoxy, came out of Jerusalem and was recorded in the synoptic gospels and Acts. If current scholarship is correct, Mark is a rendering of certain sermons of Peter delivered perhaps in Rome. Mark founded the church of Alexandria which is today’s Coptic church. It may be that some of his followers encountered the Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinope which inspired those who established the important library found at Nag Hamadi in 1946.

Matthew and Luke are derivatives of Mark, both presenting somewhat more rigorous interpretations of Jesus’ ministry. The church likes to ignore the differences and treat these “synoptic” gospels as the foundation of all its teaching. The second version includes works of John, a gospel, three epistles and Revelation. John, whether he was one writer or two or three or more was both a mystic and a philosopher. Revelation paints a vivid and horrific picture of the end times and clearly implies that few will be saved. The third and most radical version is that presented in the epistles attributed to Paul. This is the legalistic, rule bound Roman Catholic faith we know today, built on a gospel foundation to be sure but much more ascetic in morality and much less dependent on Jewish thought and practice. Pauline theology assimilated the old orthodoxy following the first Council of Nicaea in 325 and the spread of Augustinian pessimism shortly thereafter. (Interestingly, the Nag Hamadi library suggests that the Christian Gnostics considered Paul one of their own or at least a sympathizer. There is no doubt he hit upon some of the same paradoxes that concerned them but it seems highly unlikely that he had ever encountered Gnosticism at first hand.)

The synoptic gospels are said to be in agreement but, aside from a few passages that read like plagiarisms of each other, they differ in many important respects. They actually seem to be second or third hand recollections recorded by people who weren’t there—descriptions of an elephant by the proverbial blind philosophers. For example, Jesus famously spoke in parables. But of the thirty-six or so (depending on how you count) recorded in the New Testament, only thirteen are reported by more than a single evangelist. The gospels are only roughly consistent and each writer had his own agenda which is why the church fought vigorously for fifteen hundred years to keep the Bible out of the hands of lay people. But bear in mind that the church was selling redemption and salvation so it is not surprising that its understanding of the basic gospel message is that this life is merely a rehearsal for the life to come. For fifteen hundred years, princes and prelates fought furiously for control of the lives of the mass of people who lived in poverty and subjugation. Heaven was the church’s trump card. Do as we say. Be humble and docile. And your reward will be infinite joy after you die. To make this promise as credible as possible, the church had to employ the most tortuous logic against what were already ambiguous texts. This required a degree of casuistry that would make the Red Queen blush.

We do not know for certain who any of the evangelists were. Only the fourth gospel claims to have been written by a named author, John the beloved disciple (John 21:24). In any event, the synoptic gospels describe the origins and beliefs of a new (but not radically new) version of the Jewish faith. 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” (Matthew 5:17). Some of these “fulfillments” seem major. An eye for an eye (Deuteronomy 19:21) becomes turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39, Luke 6:39) and hate your enemy is transformed into love your enemy (Matthew 5:43). [3] Here and elsewhere, if you focus on the changes Jesus is calling for, it is easy to think of the good news as the gospel of love. If, on the other hand, you focus on what you have to do to lead a meritorious life, the news is not so good. It is far more difficult to love your enemy than to hate him. It is relatively easy to avoid adultery but much harder to avoid looking at a woman lustfully and harder still to pay the price of ogling Jesus demands, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29).

Jesus is not so clear as to what we must do to enter heaven. On the one hand, he says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30). But then he also says that very few will merit heaven. He tells the apostles, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:10-12). Not that the message is a secret. According to Matthew (28:19), he tells the disciples to “…go forth and teach all nations.” It seems he expects that few will understand and follow him, few will pick up that light burden.

Maybe Jesus himself did not intend to give us a blueprint. He used fourteen metaphors to describe heaven, all of them poetic but not one of which makes a great deal of sense. [4] “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33). Say what? Several times Jesus compared heaven to a mustard plant or a mustard seed. For example, heaven, “…is like to a grain of mustard, which a man having taken, did cast into his garden, and it increased, and came to a great tree, and the fowls of the heavens did rest in its branches.” (Luke 13:18). There are some 3,700 members of the mustard family but only a handful are woody and only one might be considered a tree—a very small tree—in which birds could perch. Assuming that is the species Jesus had in mind, why is heaven like a small seed that grows into a tree?

The answer may be that Jesus thought of heaven itself as a metaphor for God and God, of course, is love. It is not a place to which you go but something—something ineffable—of which you ultimately become a part. It may be similar to the state of enlightenment that is the goal of Buddhism in which the individual seeks to escape the path of reincarnation and reache Nirvana, a state of being free of craving, anger and other stresses. Alternatively, it may be like the reunion of the spark of gnosis with the godhead. In either event, perhaps the good news is that life does have a purpose which is to become one with love. Admittedly, Jesus does not really “listen” as a mystic of any kind but he is often as obscure as any of them. This obscurity, I believe, is why Paul and the apostles misunderstood him in anticipating the imminent arrival of the second coming. More importantly, it may be the solution to Paul’s lament, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

The idea of heaven as the universal storehouse of love does not have to be true any more than any other vision of an afterlife or any other myth is true. The value of narrative lies in its ability to engage the higher powers of the mind: empathy, imagination, creativity and, most importantly, our moral sense. It will never appeal to those religionists seeking dominion over others, those to whom power is the greatest good. But the idea that love is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Point Omega,” the supreme consciousness toward which our lives seem somehow directed can inspire us and give us great delight.

Notes

1. The book by the boy’s father, Todd Burpo, published by Thomas Nelson, is No. 1 on the New York Times paperback and e-books non-fiction lists for June 11, 2011.

2. Biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society and available online at biblegateway.com.

3. Matthew 5:43 quotes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” However, nowhere in the Old Testament are the Jews explicitly instructed to hate their enemies and nowhere are they told to love them. But it seems reasonable to infer the former from the Lex Talionis of Leviticus 24:19-20: “Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” God often intervened to help the Israelis in battle (e.g., Joshua 10) and the custom was to leave no enemy alive even after the battle was won.

4. In fact, most of these are technically similes beginning with such phrases as “The kingdom of heaven is like…”

CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS TAKES THE HELM
Jerry Harkins

“It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well.”
—Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
—Lewis Carroll


I am not certain that anyone actually reads Candide these days but the Archbishop of New York might profitably be reminded that the Portuguese Inquisition hanged Dr. Pangloss for the heresy of optimism and the Vatican placed his story on the Index of Forbidden Books. You can see why. After all, if this is the best of all possible worlds, what’s the use of churches? It is precisely for this reason that most hierarchs are grim, gray pessimists and their theology is morose and pitiless. When the Pope says “God is love,” he is talking about God the Avenger who is ready to cast you into hell for eating the wrong apple. In other words, tough love. Very tough.

If the American bishops who tapped Tim Dolan last month to be the President of their Conference decided to undertake any daring new initiative, you can be pretty sure the bozos would declare pedophilia a new sacrament. There are approximately 340 Roman Catholic bishops serving some 176 dioceses in the United States. All were selected for their strict conformance to Vatican-think not for their intelligence or even their holiness. All are theological conservatives and hold mainly right wing political and social views. They think women and gays are divine errors and they automatically oppose the interests of both. At present, they are also united in opposition to health care reform and will support Republican efforts to repeal it. These views are decidedly at odds with a large majority of Americans brought up Catholic. As the result, the church in America is a dying institution. It is already dead in Europe.

Apparently, Tim hasn’t noticed. He has joined the Catholic Legion of the Otherwise Distracted (CLOD). And there are many, many distractions. For one thing, the demand for exorcisms is growing rapidly under the influence of the Harry Potter phenomenon and the church has only a handful of exorcists experienced in casting out devils. For another, the bishops need to figure out how to implement the Pope’s revival of the Tridentine Mass given the fact that the seminaries stopped teaching Latin thirty years ago. Worse, they need to figure out what the hell he was talking about when he said that the use of condoms might possibly be okay for male prostitutes. That’s a doozy. Might they be okay for male but not female prostitutes? How about male porn stars? Gays? Then we have the problem of lay people who are abandoning their parishes and starting up their own congregations unsupervised by local dioceses. Some are led by defrocked priests, others by never frocked men and—horror of horrors—women. Until The New York Times reported on this movement in Belgium, the American prelates could blithely ignore it here at home. Now, however, it’s bound to attract the attention of reporters and editors who specialize in kicking the church and other dead horses. They will find it blossoming in American dioceses right under the noses of the prelates. And, of course, there’s the troublesome question of money. It may not be a crisis that would impinge on the bishops’ happy hours but it is a pesky little speed bump which is forcing them to close schools and parishes on a wholesale basis. At the top of the agenda, however, is the apparent transmission of Hepatitis A from the communion wafers at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park, Long Island to parishioners attending Christmas mass. As said wafers are the body and blood of Christ, there is some concern about Jesus’ liver function. It could have been worse. Hepatitis B would have raised truly discomforting questions.

Another non-crisis facing the church is the role of women religious. As always, the nuns are virtually the only good news in Christendom but the Curia despises them as it does all women. At the moment, it is conducting two witch hunts in the United States, an “Apostolic Visitation” by the Congregation for the Consecrated Life and a “Doctrinal Assessment” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith formerly known as the Holy Inquisition. The “Visitator” is Mother Mary Clare Millea, a canon lawyer and Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart. The Grand Inquisitor, also known as God’s Fireman, is the Most Reverend Leonard P. Blair, the Bishop of Toledo, Ohio. Both initiatives are couched in the usual Vatican doubletalk reminiscent of Big Brother. Mother Mary, for example, reminds her putative hosts that John Paul II often said the “…consecrated life, with its variety of charisms and institutions, is a treasure.” He did indeed say that but what it means in English is that women have always been a thorn in the side of the church and he worries that modernization is making them even more heretical than they used to be. So the bishops have a pretty full plate without having to worry about any daring new initiatives.

On a practical level, the church is faced with a vicious circle: it names incompetent yes-men to its hierarchy who issue absurd proclamations which make it impossible to attract intelligent men to its service. Thus, the church gets stupider and stupider and smaller and smaller. One of my favorite examples is Father Michael Cichon, pastor of the Church of the Assumption on Staten Island, who issued a fatwa denying the sacraments and religious education to the children of parents who fail to attend mass on Sundays. He enforces this by means of a bar coded identification system printed on the back of the weekly offering envelopes. Then there is the case of Thomas J. Olmsted, the wacky Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona. His Excellency recently issued a “Decree Revoking Episcopal Consent to Claim the ‘Catholic’ Name according to Canon 216” against St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center for performing a legal abortion in a case where its doctors determined a woman could not survive a fifth pregnancy. The bishop excommunicated the nun who was President of the hospital but did not order her burned at the stake. He and his advisors disagreed, you see, with the expert medical opinion which apparently conflicted with Catholic science and philosophy dating back to the thirteenth century. In any event, he was so angry that he failed to notice that the institution in question was not using the word Catholic in its name.

So when Tim says “things are going well,” you can assume that he’s in over his head and has adopted the philosophy of Alfred E. Neuman to the effect, “What, me worry?” In the real world, things are not going well at all. Consider, for example, the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York. It recently completed a project called, “Christ Jesus, Our Hope, A Diocesan Strategic Plan for Renewal.” It found that in the ten years ended in 2009, mass attendance had fallen 16%, baptisms 25%, first communions 30% and marriages 33%. At the end of the period, churches were operating at 36% of capacity and school enrollment was down 47%. Interestingly, revenues were down only 12.7% but the operating deficit was up 140% and net assets were down 375%. The financial nightmare reflects the high price of pedophilia. It will come as no surprise that Part I of the Christ Jesus Our Hope strategic plan calls for something very close to a going-out-of-business sale. The objective is not so much renewal as survival and the prospects are bleak. This is Brooklyn, the fifth largest diocese in the United States and just across the river from Tim’s own Archdiocese of New York. Out in the hinterland, things are even tougher. Eight dioceses in the U.S. have declared bankruptcy although this is pretty close to being meaningless. Some of the eight are simply trying to dodge expected tort judgments. Then there are dioceses that are in fact technically insolvent but are unwilling to open up their books to court supervision. It’s hard to know what is going on in the minds of the hierarchs.

Or take the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, the 21st largest in the country with about 731,000 Catholics in ten counties of southeastern Wisconsin. Tim may remember it because he was its Archbishop for a little more than seven years before being translated to the Big Apple. In recent years, it has closed 75 or 26% of its parishes. In the year ended June 30, 2010, contributions declined by 10% and overall revenues declined by 4%. Operating income showed a deficit of $2.1 million versus a surplus of $510 thousand in 2009. On the first business day of 2011, Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki filed for bankruptcy.

Milwaukee is not new to scandal or inept crisis management. Its former Archbishop, from 1977 to 2002, was Rembert G. Weakland, a Benedictine Abbot, a distinguished musicologist holding a Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University, and the last unabashed liberal in the American hierarchy. Under his administration, Milwaukee was probably the only diocese in Christendom whose elementary school children were taught to use condoms as part of their sex education. They were also told there is no right and wrong on such matters as abortion, contraception and premarital sex. He advocated for gay rights and women's ordination. Strangely, he was hopelessly inept at responding to the pedophilia crisis in its earliest public stages but none of this is what brought him down. Earlier in his career, he had been a practicing homosexual who had, at one point, paid $450,000 from archdiocesan funds to an extortionist with whom he had had a consensual affair decades earlier. Tim may remember all this because he was Weakland’s immediate successor. In other words, he inherited the mess. No problemo!

And then there was the little matter of the late Father Lawrence C. Murphy who sexually abused 200 boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. This went on, according to Father Murphy himself, for 22 or 24 years depending on which interview you read. From the beginning, the children tried to notify the authorities but they were largely ignored until Archbishop Weakland essentially begged Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, to defrock him. Joe refused on humanitarian grounds—Murphy was sick at the time and in fact he died two years later in 1998. Such delicacy! Tim probably does not remember this one because he didn’t arrive in Milwaukee until 2002 by which time it was old news and he is not one to rummage around in ancient history. At his mass on Palm Sunday 2010, he denounced the, “recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin.” Stuff happens. Get a life!

One of President Tim’s first actions in his new job was to appoint Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of Oakland, California as Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage. His credentials include a doctorate in canon law, the authorship of the notorious California Proposition 8 and his conduct of the first Latin mass in Northern California in 40 years. He is also one of only 17 bishops to sign the fundamentalist Manhattan Declaration. He was the perfect choice to defend marriage in that he had exactly no experience in the subject except what he read in the Vatican comic books.

It’s hard to imagine what would constitute a crisis in Timothy Dolan’s lexicon. A telegram, perhaps, from the Holy Ghost, saying, “Icebergs ahead?” Perhaps even God won’t sink this church, but stupidity and megalomania have already done so in large parts of its former domain. For too many centuries it has been dominated by a self-perpetuating coterie of old men with the social graces of two year old boys and the moral convictions of Mafia thugs. They adorn themselves in the most flamboyant frippery and relieve themselves of pretentious nonsense disguised as moral guidance. Nearer My God to Thee.

HUGHIE: PREFACE

Jerry Harkins

Hughie is a work of fiction in process. However, some parts of the story are true and some others are sort of true. There really was a Father Ed McGlynn and he really was a radical social reformer. There also really was an Archbishop Corrigan who really was something of a prig—all you have to do is look at his picture in Wikipedia. He did get McGlynn excommunicated for a time, he was a notorious sycophant, and he never did get a red hat. He did, however, secure a spot in the crypt under the main altar at Saint Paddy’s.

The title character, Big Hugh, is based roughly on my paternal grandfather, Hugh Jerome Harkins, who almost certainly did not assassinate a holy priest or anyone else but, like many Irish immigrants of his generation, liked people to think that he’d been forced to leave the old country one step ahead of the hangman. I suspect they thought that more heroic than admitting that they were dispossessed by simple economics.

The Irish love their stories which never lose anything in the retelling. Still, my grandfather was a legend. Eighteen years after his death, I had a summer job as a “runner” for an oil company headquartered in Rockefeller Center. One afternoon, I delivered a small package to the Farrell Lines docks in Brooklyn. The old man at the Receiving Desk noticed my name on the papers and wondered if perhaps I was related to Hugh Jerome. Learning the truth, he gathered some of the men and we adjourned to a local bar where they regaled me with stories about some of his exploits. A few of these may have found their way into this manuscript but I make no case for their historical authenticity.

I had considered writing an alternative history about what Brooklyn would have become had it not been “consolidated” with New York on January 1, 1898. Consolidation was a goo-goo idea and it is certainly true that New York—city and state—were in need of a dose of that uncorrupted goo-goo fresh air. They still are. As has often been the case, however, the reformers’ perch on the moral high ground led to a long series of unintended consequences the net result of which is depressing.

All of this is by way of keeping the lawyers happy by claiming fictional status for the work that follows.  I justify that claim by admitting reliance on family stories which are invariably less reliable that even eyewitness testimony.  No matter.  What is important in history is not objective truth but what people believe is true.

                                                        THE CHURCH AT EBB TIDE

                                                                         Jerry Harkins 

 We are witnessing the end days of the Roman Catholic Church. Since the beginning of his pontificate, Benedict XVI has bemoaned the “marginalization” of Christianity in Europe and America. But a major theme of his reign has been the not entirely consistent notion that Catholicism might be better off smaller but purer and he seems to be working successfully toward that goal. Church attendance is down dramatically everywhere, contributions have plummeted, many parishes have failed to register a single baptism in more than ten years and the recruitment of new priests is at an all time low. In 2008, for example, 160 Irish priests died and were replaced by exactly nine newly ordained ones. Around the world, Catholics have rejected the church’s so-called “definitive” teachings on sexuality and other great moral issues of the day. The Pope and his predecessor even failed to persuade the framers of the Treaty of Lisbon to acknowledge the European Union’s Christian heritage. Since Pius IX published his infamous Syllabus of Errors in 1864, the church has stood exposed as an irrelevant remnant of feudal social theory. The burgeoning pedophilia crisis and the Vatican’s effete response to it have exposed it as a moribund brotherhood based entirely on the lust for power among an aging priestly caste that is poorly educated and psychosexually challenged. The desperate efforts to impose archaic standards of orthodoxy have exposed the universal church to ridicule and contempt. The gospel—the “good news” preached by Jesus of Nazareth—will survive. Some will continue to call themselves Catholics and will continue to celebrate the Catholic liturgies in both traditional and modern forms. But the institutional church is no longer sustainable economically or morally. Its schismatic offspring in the form of hundreds of Protestant sects and cults are equally fragile, beset by both the ranting lunatics of the right and the distraught, ineffectual intellectuals of the left. The root of the problem is and always has been a pathological expression of what Nietzsche called the “will to power,” the drive to become master over people and events and to challenge everything that stands in the way of that mastery. The claim that whatever the church binds on earth is bound also in heaven (Matthew 16:19) has been used as a cudgel to strike the fear of fire and brimstone into the minds of the “faithful.” The church’s interpretation of whatever is breathtaking in its arrogance. The hallmarks of papal megalomania have included the bloody military suppressions of the Middle Ages, the torture and burning of heretics and witches, the massive personal cupidity of the Renaissance hierarchy, and the assault on human freedom and dignity that followed the Reformation. Today, Vatican City has become little more than a theme park but its denizens still seek to control the moral and cultural lives of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, resorting to what Garry Wills has called papal “structures of deceit” by which he means blatant lies. “The arguments for much of what passes as current church doctrine,” he writes, “are so intellectually contemptible that mere self-respect forbids a man to voice them as his own.” In spite of all this, the gospel message remains compelling. It is not without ambiguity but, as I have written previously, an honest reading reveals a clear three-part core. First and most important, God is a personal, unique and transcendent experience, not a bureaucratic rule book. Second, God is ultimately love, and love relationships without exception are the only metaphors through which we can experience and relate to God. Finally, God is our destiny, the “Point Omega” toward which we and all history seem somehow directed. Now this message is not “true” in any scientific sense but it resonates perfectly with the cardinal virtues of faith, hope and love which, in turn, are the characteristics that distinguish us as human beings. God is not a person, a character who acts in history, but an idea. Heaven is not a place but a purpose for and the meaning of existence. Rigid atheism does not work. The great French mathematician, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, explained to Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis and the British physicist, Stephen Hawking, has recently come to the same conclusion. They may well be right that God is not needed to explain the universe but God is still an essential element of human happiness. Throughout its history, the church has hijacked this reality and used it to promote the personal aggrandizement of its leaders. Its demise, therefore, is welcome even if it comes at the cost of great suffering to believing Christians. It may seem that questioning the empirical reality of God is blasphemous or heretical but it is neither. Whatever God might be, there is no entity like the elderly gentleman depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The description of God as three persons of a single substance is not a mystery but a contradiction in terms and the doctrine of transubstantiation is a primitive myth derived from ritual cannibalism. The tortuous elaborations and complexities of theology have nothing whatever to contribute to the moral life or the quest for salvation. There is no logical predicate to complete the conclusion God is… In fact, there is a tradition as old as the church itself that holds there is nothing that can be said or thought or depicted or known in a positive sense by humans about God because God is ineffable, that is, the divine cannot be described. Hence the question of God’s existence or non-existence is futile and pretentious. All that can be said is negative: what God is not. God is not a creation, not defined by space or location and not confined by time. Called “apophactic theology” from the Greek word meaning negation, it was initially propounded by Clement of Alexandria (150-215) and Tertullian (160-220) and later taken up by such early philosophers as the Cappadocian Fathers including St. Basil the Great, and by St. John Chrysostom and Psuedo-Dionysius the Areopagite. In the Middle Ages, it was taught most notably by St. Symeon the Theologian, Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross. The scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas is a dialectic of apophasis and cataphaisis, its more conventional opposite, as is the theology of the modern writer C.S. Lewis. Mother Teresa’s spiritual autobiography, Come, Be My Light, was largely misunderstood because its point of departure is very much in the same tradition. Apophasis is often associated with Christian mysticism which is something else that makes the institutional church uncomfortable and suspicious. Mystics claim to deal directly with God, the saints and angels thereby by-passing the authority of the hierarchs. Whenever possible, they were burned at the stake but often they were more trouble dead than alive. During the Middle Ages, the great mystics attracted large followings, making it difficult for the church to silence them. Dame Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) is a good example. She was not a theologian of any stripe and she did occasionally describe God in positive terms: wisdom, truth, rightfulness and, most importantly, love. But her focus is limited to what God does, not what he is. For example, she says God reveals himself as the indwelling spirit of man’s soul. She wrote and preached about God as man’s joy, full of love and compassion. She thought of sin not as evil but as a necessary path toward self-knowledge, clearly contrary to official church teaching since the time of Augustine. She always spoke of God as “mother” and seems to have meant it literally, not metaphorically. While the church said that the Black Death was God’s punishment for man’s wickedness, Julian saw it as a reminder of Christ’s passion and, thus, of his love for us. Like other mystics of her time, she claimed to be a docile child of the holy church but her reverence for the individual and the particular was and is at odds with the church’s fundamental body-of-Christ doctrine which sees itself as the exclusive mediator of the sacramental union. Dame Julian and other medieval mystics such as Angela of Foligno (1248-1309) Richard Rolle (1290–1349), Walter Hilton (?1340-1396) and the appealingly frenetic Margery Kempe (1373-1436) all experienced Christianity internally, personally and even idiosyncratically. Religion for them was a heuristic template specifically meant by God to be shaped by the individual believer. They were pilgrims on a road to glory but the road was unmapped. In the words of the much later folk hymn, “Nobody else can walk it for you, you have to walk it by yourself.” Ultimately the church has always known this and has reluctantly conceded the supremacy of individual conscience in making moral decisions although it is referring to a “well formed” conscience that is “conscientiously submissive to the Catholic church.” In other words, conscience informed by the absolute power of priests to condemn you to hell for eternity. Margery Kempe was brought to trial by church tribunals several times for such crimes as preaching in public and wearing white clothing, a sure sign of hypocrisy in a married woman. Power corrupts, as Lord Acton said. Over time, it is common if not inevitable for those running institutions to accrue more and more power, for bureaucracies to expand and for an original mission to become muddled in the resulting miasma of internal politics. Organizations become top heavy and ideologies become constraints on the ability to adapt to change. The collapse of the Soviet Union, as surprising as it was, seems obvious and inevitable in retrospect. It is Parkinson’s Law writ large. In the absence of revolution, it is almost impossible for an organization to reinvent itself and it is unlikely that the church could do so even if wanted to try. Or, more accurately, try again. In 1962, the Second Vatican Council convened with the three-fold goal of aggionamento (modernizing), ressourcement (return to fundamentals) and the “development” of doctrine. It was an extraordinary meeting and it culminated in an extraordinary document, the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope). Progressives read it as nothing less than a repudiation of much that had taken place since the Reformation and, specifically of the decrees of Vatican I. It may be they were reading into it conclusions that were only cautiously hinted at, but the legacy of the council was an upsurge of lay enthusiasm and engagement. Once the bishops went home, however, the Curia reasserted its control and the march of history resumed its downward spiral. The papacies of Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have firmly restored the status quo ante. The turning point was the retrogressive 1968 birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, but a more telling misadventure was the semi-clandestine (and so-far unsuccessful) effort to sanctify the most conservative pope ever, Pius IX. It is hard to see this effort as anything other than a desperate attempt to impose a divine mandate on a long series of reactionary absurdities. There is reason to think that the changes required for the survival of the church are so formidable as to be virtually impossible. It would require the reversal of fifteen hundred years of steadily increasing centralization of power in the Pope and the Curia. In effect, the church would have to divest Vatican City, abolish the Curia and allow the laity of all dioceses to elect their own bishops. The bishops might still elect a Pope as a constitutional monarch with a limited term of office but it would have to repudiate a long list of papal pronouncements, most notably the doctrine of infallibility. It would have to assume a much more modest dogmatic posture, allowing, for example, the possibility of good ideas emerging from without and giving up its treasured ideas about the “magisterium” or teaching authority and the claims of a unique “deposit of faith.” It would have to accept the legitimacy of the secular sphere in regulating what the church considers areas of universal natural law. As an example, the church has no standing to demand that the state impose the Vatican’s views on such subjects as stem cell research, contraception or in vitro fertilization. Obviously, it may teach anything it wishes. But once it seeks to compel compliance, even among its own adherents, whether by canonical process or the force of civil law, it is speaking not for God but as God. Thus, it is free to excommunicate Catholic politicians who do not hew to its line but, in doing so, it abandons the teaching role in favor of the police power. When its bishops denounce a Catholic university for inviting the President of the United States to speak, they invite nothing but deserved contempt for failing to engage openly with their opponents. As Mr. Obama said on that very occasion, “Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son's or daughter's hardships can be relieved.” It may be that the most essential and least likely reform is that of the ministry itself. There are about 370,000 Catholic priests in a world of 6.7 billion souls. In theory, all are celibate males who have chosen a career that insulates them from the company of women. That choice is itself very troubling. The church claims to be shocked and dismayed that so many of its clergy are pedophiles and it blames everything it can think of except its own historical misogyny. It claims that an overly sexualized society is to blame, precisely the society young seminarians are seeking to escape. In Boston, Cardinal Law blamed it on the parents of victims for not protecting their children against the ravages of priestly perverts. Gay priests are frequently the target of episcopal wrath and Vatican II is blamed for relaxing the macho standards of the good old days. The church denies it is misogynistic although John Paul II did once concede that it might once, centuries ago, have seemed to be mildly antagonistic toward women. But however one manipulates history, a church that denies the sacerdotal potential of half the human race has no claim to catholicity or universality. More importantly, it has no claim to common sense and should not be surprised when it is ignored or rejected by educated people of good will. The challenge for the church is to repudiate entirely the overbearing theory that it alone holds and withholds the keys to salvation for all humanity. Such a reduced role would be awkward for an institution that claims to be the sole authentic interpreter of the mind of God and, for that reason, it is unlikely to survive in the modern world. It is not alone in this. Even among the most observant, sectarian fragmentation is the order of the day in all religious traditions. All over the world, God is rapidly becoming secularized. We hear more and more about God, but it is a God being invoked to support political and other ideological causes. “God’s on our side” is, however, politics, not worship. For Catholics, the monolithic church of the 1950’s has already passed into history and has been replaced by scores of factions occupying every conceivable niche of belief and practice. It would, therefore, be rash to speculate about what “Catholicism” might mean in twenty, fifty or a hundred years. Perhaps the mainstream survivor will be a loosely affiliated group of Catholic Congregationalists united principally by the Apostles’ Creed. There will surely be conservative and ultra conservative sects led by bishops and popes claiming the mantle of infallibility. On the other end of the spectrum, there will be Universalist groups as there are in all religions. In between, there will be many sects promoting many agendas some of which might make Jesus weep but most of which will be consistent with the gospel even if emphasizing one element of it or another. Only one thing is fairly certain: we have arrived at a hinge of history, a “tipping point.” The church has been here before. One thinks of the Babylonian Captivity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and the rearguard decisions of Vatican I. None of these destroyed Catholicism or even changed it very much but none played out on the global stage created by the Information Revolution. Increasingly, the hierarchs are talking only to themselves. A consensus is forming in the world that, in the metaphor of Dorothy Day, the church is the cross upon which Christ is crucified. King David sings, “…even the darkness will not be dark to you; 
the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” The darkness now falling on institutional Christianity is, however, the darkness of the grave, pitiless and uncompromising.

IONA, LINDISFARNE AND THE FADING OF CHRIST’S LIGHT

Jerry Harkins

All things by immortal power,

Near or far,

Hiddenly

To each other link-ed are,

That thou canst not stir a flower

Without troubling of a star;
—Francis Thompson
The Mistress of Vision


Iona is a tiny island about nine hundred yards off the southwest coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. Lindisfarne is a somewhat larger tidal island in the North Sea just off the coast of Northumbria. As the crow flies, they are less than 200 miles apart but it is a wearing six hour drive across Scotland. In the year 635, it was a very long walk for a handful of monks from Iona who came at the invitation of King Oswald to bring the gospel to his people. The king gave the monks the island of Lindisfarne and their leader, Aidan, became its first abbot and bishop. It is a modest link but the story that played out between these two islands became a pivotal point in the history of Western Christianity and its effects have done much to define the culture of Europe and the quality of its peoples’ lives ever since.

As is obvious from the diversity of belief among his modern followers, Jesus Christ taught a spirituality rich in metaphor, symbol and ambiguity and lacking in much that might easily be codified into orthodoxy. The Nicene Creed was agreed to in 325 but there are still major differences about what it means. A single word, filioque, added in 589, became and remains the root cause of the Great Schism between East and West. Still, the gospel spread rapidly in the wake of the Roman army and Constantine’s Edict of Milan of 313. But less than a hundred years later, in the words of Saint Jerome, “The city which had conquered the whole world was itself conquered.” The Visigoths sacked Rome and destroyed its economy. The emperors moved to Constantinople and the legions were withdrawn from the provinces. Paganism returned to Europe with unseemly haste. Literacy, art, engineering, commerce and Christianity itself disappeared into the Dark Ages. Except among the Celts in Ireland and western Britain. In those outposts, far from the political and military upheavals of the continent, Christianity and learning continued to thrive.  Not the Christianity or the learning of Greece and Rome but that of the Celts and of an Irishman man named Pelagius.

It is not known exactly when or how the gospel arrived in Ireland but it certainly was imported from Britain and it had certainly established a beachhead long before Saint Patrick arrived sometime around 441. By then, it had developed beliefs and practices consistent with the gospels but quite different from those coming to dominate thinking in Rome and Constantinople. For the sake of simplicity, we may say that by the middle of the fifth century there were two main strains of Christianity in the West, one based on the rigorous theology of Augustine of Hippo, the other on a more relaxed, less dogmatic way of life associated with Pelagius.   Rome, following Augustine, preached an austere, pessimistic view of the relationship between God and creation based entirely on his doctrine of original sin which, in turn, derived from his youthful adherence to the Manichean belief that evil is the default condition of the universe. Pelagius, influenced perhaps by his Druidical forebears, could not abide such hopelessness which he saw as a mechanism for centralizing wealth and power in the hands of a few hierarchs. His Christianity was unique. It was an overlay on the nature religion that had been practiced by the Celts for millennia. He was horrified by what he saw when he visited Rome and he contended mightily with Augustine and Jerome who led the effort to have him declared a heretic. But, in fact, the issue was moot. Rome was in full retreat and Ireland was left alone to evolve as it might.

Evolve it did, producing in the fifth and sixth centuries a remarkable cohort of saints and scholars who gave rise to a vibrant brand of Christian spirituality based on the gospel of love. Hundreds of saints, among them Bridgit of Kildare, Finbar, Finan and the two Finians, Brendan the Navigator, Enda of Aran, Gall, Ultan and his brothers Fursa and Foillan. And, of course, Columcille—Columba in Latin—an O’Neill poet, warrior, monk and scholar, a great great grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages.

Columcille was something of a berserker and was often in trouble with Brehon law. Finally, he became an exile whether by dint of authority or of his own volition. He and twelve followers came to the isle of Iona and founded a monastery there in 563. From Iona, he sent missionaries to restore the faith—his Celtic faith which was all he knew—to Europe. They were spectacularly successful, bringing literacy, art and science as well as Christianity back to major centers in Scotland, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. Columcille died in 597 but Iona continued to flourish producing, among other treasures, the eighth century Book of Kells.

All went well until Oswy, Oswald’s brother and successor, married Eanflæd of Kent, a Christian of the Roman persuasion. Oswy decided that it would be desirable for everyone in his kingdom to follow the same religious practices and, to that end, he convened a great synod at the monastery of Hilda in Whitby. The two sides debated for a week in 664, the Romans represented mainly by Wilfrid, Abbot and Bishop of Ripon, the Ionians by Colman, Abbot and Bishop of Lindisfarne. It was a thorough and sometimes raucous debate that turned on the method for determining the date of Easter and the proper style of a monk’s tonsure. In the end, Oswy decided for the Romans and Colman withdrew to Iona with some of his followers. Eata, a Saxon, became the fourth abbot at Lindisfarne. Substantively the synod was unimportant, the issues trivial. But it represented a significant victory for papal primacy and it could not have come at a more opportune time. Following the death of Pope Gregory I—Gregory the Great—in 604, the church suffered a succession of ineffective leaders, including several who were scoundrels, heretics or both. They were thoroughly dominated by the Eastern Emperors who either ignored them or told them what to think. Pope Vitalian (r. 657-672), himself an Easterner, was somewhat better than most which was fortunate because he had to contend with a major heresy and a major schism. In both cases, the Emperor Constans II supported his enemies. He also had to cope with the emerging forces of Islam which had already conquered much of the Byzantine Empire in the Middle East and North Africa. The victory at Whitby gave him undisputed supremacy over at least one national church and he was able to appoint his own man, the distinguished monk Theodore of Tarsus, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore, who spoke none of the languages of the British isles, had been driven from Tarsus in 637 by some of the earliest Islamic jihadists.

Celtic Christianity lingered on in Ireland for five hundred years until the Synod of Cashel in 1172. It remained a monastery-oriented church with men and women, often married, serving as priests. It was not Utopian. There were disagreements, notably between the abbots of Columcille’s Durrow Abbey and the archbishops of Patrick’s Armagh. But it was also not institutional. Religion was a natural and intimate part of life. God was a nearby friend whom the clergy addressed on behalf of the community. Beyond the ancient Celtic belief that all Gods are one God, there was little in the way of theology or dogma. No one paid much attention to Ireland as Rome re-imposed its harsh spiritual and temporal regimen on virtually all of Western Europe. Most of the popes were more concerned about their temporal power and the wealth it brought them. Abuse became rampant. The gospel of love gave way to institutional criminality on a vast scale. When finally Pope John Paul II led his “Day of Pardon” Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on March 12, 2000, he did not go into specifics about what he was seeking pardon for. Perhaps his list included the Cathar genocide of the early thirteenth century, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the periodic witch hunts, anti-Semitism, the nineteenth century attack on modernism and liberalism and the pedophilia crisis of the twentieth century. Maybe he was thinking of the Great Schism and the mutual anathemas the Eastern and Western churches pronounced on each other in 1054. Surely he included the venality of simony, nepotism, bribery and the selling of indulgences that led to the Protestant Reformation and, hopefully, he remembered the terrible religious wars that followed. He must have regretted the church’s longstanding support for and participation in the slave trade. On the evidence, though, he probably did not include the church’s historical misogyny and the perverted teachings on human sexuality it still derives from its antipathy toward women.

Certainly the church has done much good and good people have served it well over the centuries. But it is equally true that since Whitby the church has been in moral decline. In thought and deed, the Christian enterprise has grown progressively farther away from the beatitudes, from John’s declaration that God is love (1 John 4:8), and from Jesus’ admonition to his disciples at the Last Supper, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:35)

It is perhaps too late to wonder how things might have turned out had Oswy made a better decision. Had Rome lost England a thousand years before it did, had it been forced to respond to a more empathetic, less imperious competitive theology, had it remained too weak to absorb the lion’s share of Europe’s wealth, the course of history would have been different and it is hard to imagine that it could have been worse. Augustine was not wrong to think that there is evil in the world, only to think that a loving God designed or somehow willed it that way. That single error, enveloped in the doctrine of original sin, has been the source of a great deal of human misery. For a brief moment, the world had a chance to reject it.

Iona and Lindisfarne today bear little evidence of their seventh century encounter. There are graves and ruins and, impressive though they are, they date from several hundred years after Whitby. Much was lost to the Norse raiders in the eighth century and again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the “dissolutions” of Henry VIII and the iconoclasm of Oliver Cromwell. But places retain a sense of their own history which explains why pilgrimage is such a universal and fundamental undertaking. Iona was considered sacred ground from the beginning and became the traditional burial place for kings of Scotland and Ireland including Kenneth MacAlpin, the first King of the Scots who died in 858 and the eleventh century kings Macbeth and Duncan.

As you stand where these remarkable saints stood you can sense—be overwhelmed by—the loss of the alternative history they represent. It is hard to resist the feeling that these islands were the real Camelot where once upon a time the spiritual and material worlds coexisted seamlessly and where the gospel of love still sleeps, the once and perhaps future light of the world.

SEX, SIN AND STUPIDITY
Jerry Harkins

November 26, 2002. The Archdiocese of Boston has been blundering its way through a sex scandal recently, a matter of serial pedophilia committed by multiple priests over a long period of time. As you might expect in this litigious society, people are suing for more than the church is worth and the church is trying to defend the indefensible. Among other things, it has claimed that the victims were guilty of “contributory negligence” which, in effect, means that a fair number of six year old boys seduced an impressive number of middle aged clergy. Ah, dear old Boston. For reasons that cannot be determined, this tactic isn’t going over as well as hoped so the lawyers have gone back to the library and come up with a new defense theory. Now they’re saying that these suits by victims are unconstitutional because they violate the religion clause of the First Amendment, specifically the ban on passing laws prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Pedophilia apparently has long been part of the Catholic liturgy just as human sacrifice was part of Aztec practice.

Why not? In her time, holy mother the church has engaged in some very weird rituals including the rites attendant upon the proper torture and execution of witches. To this day, it provides carefully scripted dialogues for the casting out of devils. Yes, dialogues. The exorcist enters into a conversation with the Prince of Darkness. There are some 400 exorcists in Italy alone and Pope John Paul II himself has been known to dabble in the ritual. Or consider the penance of King Henry II for the assassination of Thomas à Becket: 400 strokes with a birch rod. Ouch! But here’s the good part: the whipping was administered by 80 monks, each delivering five strokes. Why? So none would have time to get sexually aroused. The only problem was they forgot about the king. It turned out, he enjoyed the thrashing so much, he had it repeated twice.

Since the see of Boston was erected in 1808, a number of eccentric men have occupied its cathedra. [1] The incumbent is Bernard “See-no-evil” Cardinal Law, or as Jay Leno likes to call him, “Cardinal Lawless.” Bernie is not terribly bright but he is nowhere near as wicked as his enemies profess. His major problem is that he thinks being a Prince of the church entitles him to issue orders and expect unquestioning obedience. Unfortunately, he not only lacks an ounce of charisma, he is actually awkward in public, an affliction common among Catholic prelates for reasons still being investigated. This is not important because the Cardinal is toast.[2] Crisis management can be added to the long list of skills he was not burdened with, and it will eventually prove his undoing. The Vatican will find a post for him in some obscure curial ministry and he will not be heard from again. This will not, of course, solve the problem because His Eminence did not cause it. He merely treated it as standard operating procedure and, in truth, covering up the sins of the clergy has been SOP for the better part of 2,000 years. What ordinary people don’t understand is that the church must always defend priests because it worries they know too much. Actually, most but not all of them are know nothings but the hierarchy can’t tell the difference.

In the present case, the prelates, never a bunch afflicted with excessive intelligence, are confronted by a real puzzler. Human beings are sexual creatures and asexuality is very much a fringe condition. There is no way to impose celibacy or to suppress or prohibit sexual expression. You can force some individuals to re-direct its expression by imprisoning or castrating them. But sex is like breathing—natural and necessary—and one avoids it at one’s own peril. In the immortal words of Pope Leo XIII, “To take away from man the natural and primeval right of marriage, to circumscribe in any way the principal ends of marriage laid down in the beginning by God Himself in the words 'Increase and multiply,' is beyond the power of any human law." [3]

That some priests have affairs with other consenting adults is, then, normal and should be celebrated. That they sometimes commit horrendous sexual abuses is to be condemned both per se and as an abuse of authority. That the incidence of criminal sexuality may be moderately higher among priests than among men generally is a subject we will deal with elsewhere. Our concern here is the institutional hypocrisy with which the hierarchy routinely treats these matters. We need to explore just why they resort to such self-defeating absurdities as contributory negligence and freedom of religion and, more to the point, why they always seem so damned surprised every time a new revelation comes along.

Behind all the problems is the simple fact that celibacy, at best, is a tough row to hoe and, at worst, a magnet for people with certain kinds of abnormal sexual appetites. An institution seeing itself as the salvation of the human race would, therefore, be well advised not to add to its challenges by insisting on it. But the Vatican does embrace the burden of celibacy for three reasons, all of which are demonstrably foolish.

First, celibacy is said to facilitate devotion to Christ by leaving the heart undivided. But there is absolutely no evidence that love is a zero sum game. It is pure stupidity to say that a person cannot love a wife, children, God and the church simultaneously and without diminution. You can’t slice and dice love just as you cannot say your love of chocolate ice cream diminishes your love of rare roast beef. On the contrary, like knowledge, the expression or experience of love is likely to enhance and increase its store. The love of a wife and children is so rewarding that it can only increase one’s love of others, including Jesus. Nor can it be said that Catholic priests are any more Christ-like than their married Eastern Orthodox or Protestant counterparts If anything, the evidence is that they are a lot less so when it comes to children. Among the world’s major religions, only Roman Catholics forbid clerical marriage. Judaism and Islam virtually require it.

Second, the church argues that celibacy increases the availability of the priest for the complete service of the Gospel. In other words, a colicky child will not distract him from the preparation of Sunday’s homily. This is a trivial issue but, to the extent it is true, it is true for the whole world, an inherent part of the human condition. Kids especially are distracting but God should have thought of that when he told Adam and Eve to increase and multiply. It should also be said that the experience of having a family is certain to improve the quality of homilies. In all candor, it must be noted that the quality of Catholic homilies could not get a lot worse than it already is.

Finally, it is said that celibacy enhances the spiritual fruitfulness of the priest's ministry. Don’t you love that phrase? What does “spiritual fruitfulness” mean? Does it have anything to do with nurturing the spiritual lives of the faithful? If so, the celibate church is making a terrible mess of things not only with all its pedophilia, but also with its gaga teachings about sex in general which have driven away the vast majority of educated Catholics all over the world.

No. Let the truth be told. When the church instituted celibacy in the twelfth century, it did so to prevent clerics from having families that might inherit wealth that would otherwise go to the church. They had tried other means such as insisting that the wives and children of priests were slaves but for some reason that didn’t work. In other words, the original rationale had nothing to do with the bullshit they proclaim today. So why don’t they change the rule? Because it’s cheaper to support an unmarried priest than to be burdened with a family that does not practice birth control. It also dovetails nicely with their historic aversion to sex as a general principle. Reflecting this aversion, the Pope thinks that God invented sex to punish Adam and Eve but did not foresee the unintended consequences.

It should be stressed that celibacy itself can be an admirable modus vivendi increasing the world’s capacity for love, service and creativity. The same thing is true of any number of life styles. The problem is compulsion, the power to impose a life style on someone else. The danger is choosing a life style for reasons that have nothing to do with love, service or creativity. One should not become a soldier because one is attracted to rape and pillage or a fire fighter because one is attracted to arson. Armies and fire departments are aware of these problems and screen for them in their selection processes. Seminaries should be equally careful about the reasons candidates opt for celibacy. The rest of us must constantly remind ourselves that history is replete with the lives of celibate men and women who are ornaments of civilization. It is in the nature of perversion to attract only a small minority. Having said that, we should also acknowledge that the theology of priestly celibacy is riddled with hypocrisy and superstition.

Notes

1. The beloved Richard Cardinal Cushing led the archdiocese between 1944 and 1970 and did so with humility, grace and an occasional jar of the creature. Americans of a certain age will never forget the eulogy he delivered at the funeral of JFK in 1963. Nonetheless, he was an eccentric of a very high order. Preaching in the slums of Lima, Peru in 1964, he said, “We read in the New Testament that our blessed Lord rode on an ass in triumph into the city of Jerusalem. Today the Lord rides on another ass: I myself.” He became very progressive on most issues facing the church but admitted that the ordination of women was not something he could support. Confessing his sins to a woman, he said, would be like doing so on television.

2. The Pope accepted Law’s resignation on December 13, 2002. Shortly thereafter he became chaplain of the Sisters of Mercy of Alma convent in Clinton, Maryland. Eighteen months later, the Vatican found a new job for him as Archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome. This is the church that houses the original crib in which Jesus was laid after he was born. Quick now, who was Law’s predecessor as Archpriest? Give up? He was Cardinal Carlo Furno who was also the Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre between 1995 and his retirement in 2007. Law holds no such prestigious appointment.

3. Arcanum divinae sapientiae, June 24, 1888. The title means “The hidden design of divine wisdom,” and the letter is essentially a tirade against divorce. In this excerpt, Leo is saying that it is beyond the capacity of the state to become involved in any way with Christian marriage. The church, of course, is another story entirely. The church, as a divine institution, is perfectly able “to circumscribe in any way the principal ends of marriage laid down in the beginning by God Himself.”

THE BIZARRE NOTION OF BIBLICAL INERRANCY
Jerry Harkins

The Bible is a strange book. When we first meet him, its hero is a thoroughly unlikable and unstable fellow named God. He’s a nasty piece of business who’s always looking for innovative ways to torture and humiliate people. He sends an angel with a flaming sword to evict Adam and Eve from their home because they ate an apple he was saving for himself. It seems God thinks the only difference between himself and human beings is the knowledge of good and evil which can be conveyed by the apples of that particular tree. [1] It gets worse. He turns Lot’s wife into a column of salt for the crime of glancing back at Sodom, a town he has just destroyed with fire and brimstone. [2] He utterly ruins Job — who he boasts is the most blameless and upright of men— for the sake of winning a whimsical bet with Satan. He imposes an obscene loyalty test on Abraham (although he relents at the last moment) but makes Jephthah sacrifice his daughter to fulfill a rash promise made in a moment of panic. [3]

What strikes me as really strange, however, is that there are millions and millions of people, mostly Americans, who claim to believe that every single word of this book is the literal truth. Not myth. Not metaphor. But Truth, writ large, in spite of all its internal inconsistencies and a level of gibberish that would earn a sophomore a low C. This is called the doctrine of inerrancy, an idea that floated around in the darker recesses of theological speculation for centuries before seeing the light of print in 1978. In that year of grace, 300 Evangelical Pooh-Bahs gathered at the International Congress on Biblical Inerrancy in Chicago and decreed as follows:

Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.

This, of course, is nonsense; every phrase of it is utter foolishness. God-given? How did the Pooh-Bahs know that? The Bible says nothing at all about its own literary origins. And which Bible are you talking about anyway? Does it include the Apocrypha? Fifteen books? Thirteen? If it does not, do you have a Bible that does not trace to the Septuagint which does? And as to the events of world history, maybe you want to believe that God flooded the planet to a depth of 15 cubits above the highest mountains. Maybe you don’t care where all that water came from or where it went when God finally pulled the plug. But you can’t escape the simple madness of the Noah story. Consider the curse of Canaan. Canaan was Ham’s son, Noah’s grandson. One day, after the flood, Noah got drunk and fell asleep naked. Ham happened upon him in that condition. When he sobered up, Noah was furious that his son had seen him naked. So he cursed his grandson: “Slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Now believe what you will about the source and destination of the flood waters, but do you really think that the institution of slavery is explained never mind justified by Ham’s noticing that his father had no clothes on? [4] And, where was God when Noah went off his medication? The moment the old man uttered his curse, any decent God would have struck him dead. Boy did I make a mistake. This Noah is a loose cannon. Instead, here’s what you get: “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous god. I punish the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation…” Except for the sin of eating the wrong apple. Then it’s all generations.

The Catholic Church does not like to talk about inerrancy anymore because it is smart enough to be embarrassed. But press them hard enough and the official theologians will tell you this about the books of the Bible:

They are sacred and canonical "because, having been written by inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author, and as such have been handed down to the Church. The inerrancy of the Bible follows as a consequence of this Divine authorship. Wherever the sacred writer makes a statement as his own, that statement is the word of God and infallibly true, whatever be the subject-matter of the statement.” [5]

There’s a little wiggle room there and more has been added since it was written in 1913. When Jesus warns against “…false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing,” a Catholic does not have to believe that people who wear wool suits are heretics. Real fundamentalists, on the other hand, must wear strictly polyester. In the New Testament, Jesus speaks 572 lines. Many of these are metaphorical. He speaks in parables, stories that are obvious fiction meant to make an abstract point. When asked why, he says, “… to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” [6]

No, Virginia, the world was not created on October 23, 4004 BC. The sun did not stand still for the Battle of the Five Kings. Jonah was not swallowed by a whale. Mary was not, strictly speaking, a virgin. Lots of stuff reported in the Bible never happened. Still, it is not a fraud and the “errors” it contains are not lies. The Bible makes no claim to truth, [7] only to wisdom. And wisdom is nothing less than the ability to face an indifferent universe with equanimity. The Bible wouldn’t work if all were sweet and light and God had the Rorschach profile of Santa Claus.

For example, the story of God’s injustice to Job is not history but rather a rich metaphorical palette which allows us to explore some of the most profound issues of the spirit. Its genius lies precisely in the fact that it is plastic enough to be meaningful across generations and cultures. It is the lynchpin in the Bible’s exploration of the great themes of righteousness and justification. In it, the youthful, impetuous, egomaniacal God of the Torah comes of age and begins to learn something about divine responsibility. He still rants. Even at the end of the story, he cannot resist mocking Job: Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up dominion over the earth? But under the bluster, it is clear that God has learned that these lowly mortals have powers of their own, formidable faith and courage among them, and the greater part of wisdom might just be to beat a strategic retreat now and then in the interest of preserving as much divine dignity as possible. This epiphany comes not a moment too soon. We are about to encounter the sin of King David which the new improved God will punish but ultimately forgive. [8] The God of Genesis would surely have destroyed all of Israel for a lot less than the king’s sexual dalliance with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, Uriah the Hittite.

There is some real history in the Bible but essentially it belongs in the fiction section. God is both a mythic figure and a very real presence in history and, in Job, we are privileged to witness the Jews as they reach a milestone in their understanding of that presence. Previously, they had accepted the ancient Sumerian view of a deity who spoke through the thunder and who was worshiped with awe. In the new version, God would be more dependent on his own creation for fulfillment, more subtle in judgment. Ultimately, Christians would serve this new God with love. Jesus would teach, “Love the Lord, your God…Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Love in the West would become a sort of over-theme in human affairs, the glue of the social contract, if not always in practice, then at least as the standard by which we judge ourselves and each other.

Between Job and David, Israel’s religious understanding had evolved dramatically. Job could not have served this theme if he had been a Jew or anything less than a blameless and upright man. Had he been a Jew, he would have had at least a tenuous covenental claim on God’s justice. Had he been a sinner, he would have attracted neither attention nor sympathy. As it is, Job is a metaphor for the emerging idea that God and his creation do not exist independently of each other.

Mary is cast as a virgin to advance the same thesis. Gabriel tells her she will bear a son and she replies, “How can this be, I am still a virgin?” Had she not been a virgin, the idea that “…the Most High will overshadow you” would not have been taken seriously, by Mary or anyone else. As it is, she can accept the angel’s assurance, saying,“…as you have spoken, so be it.” And a short time later, greeting her cousin Elizabeth, she can speak the remarkable words of the Magnificat, “My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit rejoiceth in God, my savior.” [9] This is a defining moment for Christians. Mary knows she is a virgin. She knows she is nevertheless pregnant. But the contradiction is overwhelmed by her faith in the angel’s explanation. Her soul, informed by this faith, proclaims, “magnifies” and actually enhances the glory of God. Before Mary, witness or worship was an obligation of law. After the Magnificat, it became a celebration of mutual love. The glory of God is now justified and sanctified by the glory of his creation. This is the end of a long evolutionary process that began when the Jews brought back the first glimmerings of monotheism from Mesopotamia. From a modern perspective, it is hard to imagine how anything less than the God of love would differ from the worship of stone idols, black holes, or one’s own formless fears.

Sadly, the idea of the interdependence of God and his creation would never become universal. Even the great Puritan theologian and poet, John Milton, explicitly denied it:

…God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best… [10]

But for three or four thousand years, that has been precisely the issue. Is religion really a set of obligations and rituals — the mild yoke, if you will — imposed from above and meekly obeyed here below? Or is it rather a nuanced creation of societies and cultures meant to promote social comity in the here and now? This question in various guises has engaged the greatest religious thinkers and continues to divide believers. To the intellectually challenged, it is blasphemous on its face because it denies the reality of God. To those with a less constricted view of reality, however, the question itself is liberating and invigorating.

The danger of fundamentalism — whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim — is that it insists on avoiding the question, seeking instead to resolve essentially trivial questions by resort to naked force. Whether, for example, Mary was literally a virgin is of monumental insignificance in the face of the sublime questions raised by the Annunciation. It makes no difference what Reverend Falwell believed about this or about the organization of the solar system or about the sexuality of Tinky Winky Teletubby. He became a menace only when he started agitating for laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution or, worse, mandating the teaching of creationism. It is not so much that his inerrancy might mislead children. Rather it is that inerrancy denigrates the Bible, robs it of its capacity to speak to the hearts of the generations, and obscures its universal wisdom. If Falwell and his ilk are right, the Bible, as both literature and moral instruction, is on a par with knitting instructions: knit one, purl two, be saved.

Notes

1. It has always interested me that Adam and Eve are accused of the “sin” of disobedience. But until they actually ate it, they did not know the difference between good and evil.

2. An interesting story, this. On his way to Sodom, God decides to share his plan with Abraham who must have been shocked at the pure evil of it. He stands up to God and gets him to agree to spare Sodom and Gomorrah as long as he can find as few as ten good men in them. Abe’s rebellion is couched in all the usual obsequiousness. “May I presume to speak to the Lord, dust and ashes that I am…?” he asks. “Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” he cajoles. God agrees if only to shut him up but then proceeds to unilaterally abrogate the agreement by destroying both cities without bothering to look for good men. (It is only mildly annoying that no one seems to care about good women and children. They get buried in the hellfire and brimstone for the sins of the men. When has it ever been different?) Anyway, one of the avenging angels warns Lot and his family to flee for their lives and not to look back. (This is the test Mrs. Lot fails.) So now all Lot has left is two daughters without husbands. For some unexplained reason (after all, they have just come from Zoar, a small town that had been spared) the daughters think they are the last people on earth so, to continue the line, they have to get pregnant, and they do. By their father, of course, since he’s the only guy around. Each bears a son, Moab and Ben-ammi. Then, Moab presumably marries either his mother or his aunt and becomes the progenitor of the Moabites. Ben-ammi becomes the first of a long line of Ammonites in an analogous way. Thus, Lot was the father and grandfather of Moab and Ben-ammi and Lot’s daughters were the mothers of their own siblings. This sort of thing happens in the best of families. In the 15th Century, Pope Alexander VI may well have sired a son, Rodrigio Borgia, Jr., by his own daughter, Lucrezia, in which case he too was simultaneously the child’s father and grandfather.

3. The story of Jephthah so disturbed Martin Luther that he wrote a commentary claiming that it didn’t happen the way the Bible clearly says it did happen. Luther proposed that the line “…he [Jephthah] fulfilled the vow he had made; she died a virgin” did not mean he sacrificed her. I’ll let you make up your own mind on that but please don’t read Judges11 if you have a queasy stomach. In fact, this passage is as clear as any in the Bible and it forces the believing reader to take one of three positions. First, it happened just the way it says and proves that the God of the Old Testament was capable of behaving despicably. Or, second, Luther was right and the Bible is clearly wrong. Third, you can say that what we’re dealing with here is a parable. It didn’t happen but it’s a good story that forces you to reflect on important moral issues. The same issues are explored in the fragmentary Greek myth of King Idomeneo of Crete which, in turn, is the basis of a glorious opera by Mozart.

4. There is no mention of slavery in the Bible until Noah invents it here (Genesis 9:20-27). God confirms it when he gives the commandments to Moses at Mount Sinai. In practically the same breath, he sets forth the rules that govern such matters as the ownership of the children of slaves, and the rights and obligations of daughters sold into slavery (Exodus 21:1-11).

5. “The Bible,” Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913.

6. Mark 4:10-12.

7. While it is a fact that the Bible does not claim to be true, it must be admitted that dozens of its characters claim to be speaking for God. Paul, for example, tells the Galatians (1:11-12), “…the gospel you heard me preach is no human invention…I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” The same claim has been made by saints and sinners from time immemorial. Even today, Pat Robertson speaks to God on a regular basis.  More impressively, God talks back.

8. In typical biblical fashion, others, mostly innocents, are called upon to pay the price of David’s iniquity. Bathsheba’s first born is struck dead. David’s son Absalom rapes ten of his concubines in public, in broad daylight. In other words, the wrath of God falls on women and children. But at least the principals survive and David and Bathsheba have another son, Solomon. But what is most interesting here is that David begs forgiveness in the full expectation that he will get it. In Psalm 51, he implores, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love…” It is here that the Jews first realize that God has an obligation to forgive arising out of love. It is still a tentative understanding but it is a step toward the idea that God cannot withhold forgiveness. Bill Clinton was borrowing from David’s strategy when he told the 1998 White House Prayer Breakfast, “…if my repentance is genuine and sustained, and if I can maintain both a broken spirit and a strong heart, then good can come of this for our country as well as for me and my family.” This is a direct echo of the same Psalm, Verse 17, to the effect that God will not despise a broken spirit and a contrite heart.

9. This is sometimes mistranslated to imply that it is God who is magnifying Mary’s soul. St. Jerome’s Latin vulgate says, “…magnificat anima mea Dominum et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.”

10. Sonnet XIX. It may be that Milton was the greatest theologian of them all, greater than Jerome, greater than Maimonides, greater than Thomas Aquinas. Of him, Wordsworth wrote:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.

In this instance, however, Milton allies himself with the most regressive theocrats of history. He was, I believe, confused by the extraordinarily obtuse eleventh chapter of Matthew, the last line of which is, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” In almost all other things, he and the other Roundheads were the theological progressives of their time. They are still regarded as heretics by those of today’s fundamentalists who can read or who know someone who can.