I’ll never understand faith. This is a lament, not chastisement-
There are several religious conversion stories that involve a traumatic experience, triggering an immediate assessment of the convert’s purpose for being, inevitably said purpose is found lacking, thus producing a new zeal for belief in spiritual transcendence. This new awareness, defined by the Christian as grace, carries with it the characteristics of a palliative. Near death experiences will do that. Reason reconfigures within a new internal logic based on the emotional response to the traumatic event: “I feel so much better because of this encounter with the divine- therefore it is real.” Predictable enough; no one in their right mind wants to die. It’s no wonder why the conversion tales of St. Paul, Martin Luther, Little Richard and George W. Bush all involve staring death in the face. A right mind, though, may now be in question.
Years ago, I had what I took at the time to be a near death experience: an anxiety attack that required EMT’s. It was, as one shrink described, the result of too many anchors. Coffee, pot, cough syrup and gluten, I think, had conspired over several days to blow a fuse. I really thought it was the end. A stampeding heart rate and the inability to draw a proper breath will convince anyone of that. However, no divine revelation was inspired by this peek at mortality- no oath to serve a Bronze Age deity- Nothin’!- Just a realization that I’d better find purpose or hit the happy pills. The anxiety was triggered by the various stimulants but it was really a symptom of a low frequency depression that is often colloquially defined as a mid-life crisis. The doctor who did a work-up on me afterwards wouldn’t employ such an imprecise term but that’s what he basically diagnosed. He offered me the pharmaceutical solution and some talk therapy but I declined.
Without professional help, save the employment of some informal behavior modification strategies, it took about eight years to rid myself of the High Anxiety (the general term for my level). The only long term casualty was an inability to fly- can’t do it anymore. Don’t really need to. That’s termed “avoidance behavior”. So be it. I haven’t been on a plane since 2000 so I’ve avoided all of the subsequent hassles attending commercial aviation. And I have no faith. I doubt I ever did so maybe one needs a dormant sense of loss in order to recover those assumptions that fuel the post-traumatic zeal.
Truthfully, I don’t believe anything. I either know it- as much as subjective cognition can be described as “knowing”- or I construct a plausibility table, categorizing any bold claim that disrupts my waking slumber from utterly impossible to comfortably reasonable. A first century AD woodworker is executed, rises from the dead to expiate mankind’s sins, etc. Not likely. Luck is a bi-product of skill; more reasonable but hard to quantify outside a containment field of enforceable rules. The St. Louis Cardinals won the 2011 World Series- unassailable fact. Fine, I guess I can live with that.
So, belief- right… I ask you, then, what is Christianity at this point? Not being a believer, I’m far more interested in why this is still a going concern. A man no one I know has ever heard of (plausible given the absence of credentialed historians in my drinking circles), Gasparo Contarini, is probably the one individual more than any other that has made the world we live in the irrational amalgam of technological wonders and craven superstition. Contarini (1483-1542) was a Roman Catholic cardinal from Venice but a very plausible argument can be made that he is in fact the first Protestant. In 1511, three years before Martin Luther’s Thurmerlebnis, the so-called “tower experience” whereby Luther came to the conclusion that faith alone, and not in tandem with good works (i.e., indulgences- that is, making a donation to the church counts as good works) was the path to salvation, Contarini expressed in a letter to a fellow prelate basically the same thing: faith alone is the buy-in to Heaven. He also states that man is devoid of all of those attributes that supposedly distinguish him from baser life forms. It is, according to Contarini, an act of faith alone that infuses God’s love, not ours, within this empty vessel. This is the impoverished claim that will not only support Luther with Venetian money and political influence within the next ten years, but eventually form the basis for an even more insidious rationale for the materialist fetish this perpetually warring world is enslaved to: Calvinism.
So what was a Venetian Cardinal doing espousing what was in thought, word and deed (or lack thereof) a heresy? The answer lies in the fact that Venice, one of the most powerful states in the medieval world, had been badly damaged by the first pan-European military expedition in history, the League of Cambria. The League consisted of forces from most of the major powers of Europe assembling at the behest of Pope Julius II to put an end to Venetian influence in northern Italy. Given, too, the location Venice held in relation to eastern trade routes and the skim they took from everyone within reach, breaking the Venetian banks was also a prime directive emanating from Rome. And don’t get me wrong- this is no brief for the Papacy. Neither side had much to say about universal suffrage. What was lost in the fire was knowledge of the divine, not belief. The standardization of reality through the scientific revolution practically demands we believe something outside the reach of consensus reality. We’d all go nuts without a theoretical escape hatch. But belief is a weak substitute for knowing.
The Venitians were initially defeated, having their satellite states divided by league members. As the war progressed from 1508 through 1516, adversaries aligned, broke off, realigned in several configurations until the status quo was exhaustively reestablished, the cluster fuck of violence concluding nothing politically. The defeat of Venice seemed like a foregone conclusion given that the Republic’s armies were largely staffed by mercenaries from the very countries they were fighting. Add to that the fact that the population of Venice was made up primarily of subsistence wage immigrants with no great investment in the sympathies of their overlords. And, finally, to the tradition that the figli secondo- the second sons of the Venetian property class- could not inherit any portion of their father’s estate; the lot of it falling to the first born male to ensure that family fortunes remained intact and undivided, thus driving the lesser heirs to the priesthood, new lands or vice. How Venice survived at all was testament to its real power- the unshakeable belief that the sole function of a state was to survive no matter what the cost- the original application of the Machiavellian classic that the ends justify the means. Existence, whatever it takes, is the sole justification for being. With this intellectual and moral vacuity, it is little wonder how the Christian causa primaria- that being charity as an outward expression of faith- could be so cavalierly extracted and disposed of by Contarini, the local representative of the one true church.
But resolve of this sort can only produce the desired results through an organic process. The few hundred wealthy estates, in order to survive, had to resort to subterfuge, a Venetian specialty (a prime demonstration of Venetian duplicity is found in the machinations of Iago, Othello’s trusted advisor; it is the clearest distillation of Venetian statecraft ever imagined). Of the various Venetian schemes, one of the most important was the sponsorship of Luther as a rear guard action against the Germans. Dividing the German troops along religious lines weakened their resolve. This assisted the Venetians in maintaining a coherent and unbroken narrative until 1798 when they were finally reduced to a tourist destination by Napoleon. Long before, though, the Venetian fortunes migrated to the second great power to divide from Rome- England. With their agents in place, Henry VIII found himself manipulated by intrigue and an enabled megalomania into a split with the papacy. This allowed Venice to sever England’s alliance with Catholic Spain, who repelled Venice for the most part. But the betrayal allowing Venice access through the Channel to Holland and those allies and investments was decisive. With a Venetian base in Britain, many in France eventually fell to the Protestant contagion and the resulting schism and its clarification and ratification in Calvin would eventually claim the collective spirit and reduce the human condition to a series of neurological spasms explained solely by science, the successor to the secular religion of philosophy.
I suppose under such conditions, it’s not possible to construct a viable definition of transcendence; certainly not when head-butted by the dominant empiricism ushered in by Contarini et al. that informs compulsory public schooling. Add to that the Calvinist supposition of justifiable sinners (since salvation is God’s alone to distribute, it doesn’t matter what you do- kill, rape, run Ponzi schemes- if you don’t win the spiritual lottery you are damned anyway and piety won’t save you). With these restrictions placed on the so-called rational mind, only the ‘primitive” will resist the punishing absolutism of materialism- which is being packaged in some quarters as doctrinal atheism. In this spiritual wasteland left by the Venetian’s short sighted anti-papist strategies, rational impositions demand categorizing any transcendent vision as the result of nothing more than a synaptic misfire. As such, it might be better not to believe in belief at all- at least until our heads clear.
TM
12/13/11
