Faith in the All-Encompassing Magical Love Bubble
What a friend is Michael to offer me the softest of landings from this week’s little blogging break: an invitation to carry on about Catholicism and Pantheism. What, indeed, could be more ‘katholikos’ than pantheism, and what better name for Neural Buddhism than European Buddhism (which is what Nietzsche called it when he beat David Brooks to the punch by writing the Genealogy of Morals)?
The first thing I should do is make plain that I highly credit and enjoy Michael’s own neural endowments, even though his fantasies about replacing thriving, quintessentially American holy rollers with feeble, quintessentially European monastic gurus really put the lotion in my basket. Personally I am appalled because I have to try to advance an argument against Neuro-European Buddhism that may be too boutique to rally around. But culturally speaking, advancing that argument seems important enough to try anyway.
Because I’m not interested in simply pitting Nietzsche against the All-Encompassing Magical Love Bubble and declaring Nietzsche the winner. When the only standpoints or traditions brought to bear on the subject are Catholicism, Pantheism, atheist panerotism, and anti-panerotist atheism, the absence of a certain something — Protestantism — tends to reduce the conversation to an argument about whether cruelty is the greatest or the worst. That argument is a good entry point to the larger set of questions I want to raise. Consider Nietzsche:
It was precisely here that I saw the great danger to humanity, its most sublime temptation and seduction. — But in what direction? To nothingness? — It was precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, the standing still, the backward-glancing exhaustion, the will turning itself against life, the final illness tenderly and sadly announcing itself. I understood the morality of pity, which was always seizing more and more around it and which gripped even the philosophers and made them sick, as the most sinister symptom of our European culture, which itself had become sinister, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a European Buddhism? to — nihilism? . . . This modern philosophical preference for and overvaluing of pity is really something new.
Nietzsche vastly underrated how America could pump fresh blood into the religion of pity by engulfing it in the vague but energetic power of a certain Protestant understanding of love. Typical European that he was, Nietzsche was obsessed with the problem of the Catholic church, and although he enjoyed Emerson when it came to grasping fully the implications of deregulated Christianity in the U.S. he was lost. That deregulation produced two main streams of Protestant love theology. The first is relatively poorer, more mobile, more Western (and thus Southern), and far more fundamentalist. There, the Holy Spirit was the key to experiencing God (and thus divine love), although it was deeply understood that this experience itself was not God, even if the experience was also understood as a direct, unmediated interaction with the Lord. The second stream of Protestant love theology (as I’m categorizing them) is relatively richer, more stationary, more Northeastern, and — you see where this is going — far less fundamentalist. We are long past scarlet letter territory in Yankee New England when my analysis puts it into frame. We are in territory in which not the Holy Spirit but Jesus is the key figure of the trinity. Jesus is the human figure of contemplation that connects the faithful to divine experience — Jesus the loving man who lived out his love in recognition of Something Higher. Lapsed son of a Protestant minister that he was, Nietzsche pitted himself against this Jesus, a man who, he railed, loved so deeply and profoundly that he called his love God, the better to damn anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t return his love. Nietzsche missed the way in which a Protestant religion of love could migrate away from the personal Jesus and into the realm of Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, and Pantheism — where the Holy Spirit comes back into view but also swallows and becomes God Himself, the All-Encompassing Magical Love Bubble.
This migration gained a tremendous appeal for Northeastern Protestants who could not in good conscience go on talking to Jesus the way their Southern and Western co-religionists did — even the Social Gospel ones, who were motivated by similar understandings of erotic solidarity. As Yankee Christianity grew deeper and deeper roots in the New England soil; as it grew better educated, more technologically advanced, and ever-wealthier along the Eastern seaboard; as it developed its first gurus in its contemplative upstate/Vermont hinterland; and as its Puritan heritage became economically and socially secularized (under pressure from massive Catholic immigration, strangely) into a Blueblood/Brahmin heritage, Yankee Christianity lost faith in its own ‘second stream’ and sought to reconcile its worldly priorities with its transcendent understanding of cosmic humanness.
This is a profoundly different account of the secularization of Protestantism than the one Max Weber, that quintessential European, gives us. For Weber, Protestant faith had to reconcile itself to the world. Maybe in the Old World, but what I’m arguing here is that, in America, Protestantism disestablished itself in a process that sought to reconcile the world itself to changing tenets of faith. The Yankee Protestants I’m interested in got ‘less religious’ because they were becoming ‘more spiritual’. The sterility of the Puritan work ethic could become an inspiring task of Perfection and Progress, driven by a mystical, cosmic understanding of the human race as a brotherhood of persons united in love. Scientific experiment and spiritual experience could become two variations or even versions of inhabiting the moment of human action, movements toward the same end, complements in which concentrated knowledge and concentrated feeling could nourish the whole self and perhaps even experientially converge.
Which brings us back to Brooks and Michael. Michael is right I think to level this criticism of Brooks:
Just because neuroscientists can describe what an ecstatic experience looks like and verify that believers are not lying when they say they are having such an experience doesn’t mean there isn’t a simple material explanation for it.
But the problem here is the relationship between ecstasy and experience. The whole point of telling this story about American Protestantism’s two streams is to rhetorically highlight the difference between the first, more ecstatic stream and the second, more sterile variety. Neither Brooks, Michael, nor I are really talking about the convergence of (shall we say) Dixie Protestantism with the science of ecstatic experience — although this is an interesting separate question. The topic at hand is the continuing scientific reinforcement of the vague, secularized, cosmic spirituality with which Yankee Protestantism replaced itself. This is the combination that gets you Neurobuddhism.
But take away the ‘N’ from this very American faith and you get the very transatlantic Eurobuddhism, which, as Nietzsche recognized, is at its purest when practiced under the total submission and uniform unity that only a Catholic Church makes possible. Nietzsche simply ditched his father’s Protestantism. He spent a lifetime trying to get across the depth of his special abhorrence of Catholicism, tearing his hair out over the Bavarian character and publishing lines like “Borgia as Pope — am I understood?!” He hated Luther not on any doctrinal point but because he forced the Catholic Church to be true to itself and in doing so saved it for another thousand years.
So the monstrous question at the end of this story is: why does this scientific mysticism of human love and universal goodness grow out of post-Catholic soil in Europe and post-Protestant soil in America? And the sub-question I want to pose in response to Michael is: why might American Catholics be less worried about the spread of the scientifically-endorsed All-Encompassing Magical Love Bubble than American Protestants? As Michael says,
If neural Buddhism comes, it will be an invitation for American religion to move away from its emotionalism (and obscurantism) and back to serious theological reflection. I can’t wait.
This is obviously a knock at those crazy outback Dixie Christians, who think praying on a mountaintop is as good as praying in a Church, and preach other emotional doctrines. Fine. But the problem for Michael, and American Catholics more generally, is that the ‘invitation’ of which Michael speaks makes the grand gesture of retaining theology in exchange for the elimination of a creator God. God ceases to be something superior to experiences and becomes experiences themselves: this is the central tenet of Pantheism. What Christianity brings to the table is a privileging of the love experience. What Catholicism brings to the table is a top-down, unitary, deeply institutionalized management structure for shared privileged experiences. Theology will be okay insofar as it is a science — the science of solidarity. Michael claims that Neurobuddhism
will undermine the faith of people whose spirituality relies exclusively on their ecstatic feelings – and that is a good thing for religion.
But as I said above, Neurobuddhism and Eurobuddhism undermine ecstatic spirituality while raising the cult of felt experience to new heights. Instead of the thunderous physicality of BEING HEALED! in Protestant surroundings, N/Eurobuddhism offers being healed as the banal smile, the blithe meditation circle, the easy bliss, the deep thoughts, the all-purpose love, Eros castrated. Post-ecstatic experience, the purest ecstasy will be the feeling of feelinglessness. These are the terms on which Jesus is permitted back into the tent: the ethnic gentleman with the big heart that renders any sexual lifestyle choice, including asexuality, as simply many different and equal ways of expressing cosmic communion in panhuman love. Indeed, any behavior is a path to the experience of love, except violent or cruel or nonconsensual behaviors. And given the high-stress impact of everyday life, the avalanche of detail and the bombardments of ads and gizmos, deep immersion in the placid bath of pantheistic togetherness is the ultimate therapy. Picture yourself sailing the sea of Yes. Repeat the mantra. Visualize flying whales in space. Let your body tingle. Achieve conveniently momentary sessions of totally self-aware being. Practice the doing that is no doing. The pause that refreshes.
For certain kinds of American Protestants, this sounds a lot like falling asleep in Catholic Church. Certainly the Vatican has been working to restore the less lovey-dovey aspects of Christian faith to the fore, but they have yet to reconquer the John Kerrys of the world. The point is that catholicism of any kind, and thus the Catholic religion, embodies the same structure of knowledge as science — a total body of truth which one can never fully command but which is to be fully embraced. Absolutely zero surprise that I can come across lines like these this morning:
[Reverend José Gabriel Funes, head of the Vatican Observatory and a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict XVI] said dialogue between faith and science could be improved if scientists learned more about the Bible and the church kept more up to date with scientific progress.
He said he believed as an astronomer that the most likely explanation for the start of the universe was “the big bang,” the theory that it sprang into existence from dense matter billions of years ago. But he said this was not in conflict with faith in God as creator. “God is the creator,” he said. “There is a sense to creation. We are not children of an accident.”
He added: “As an astronomer, I continue to believe that God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the product of something casual but children of a good father who has a project of love in mind for us.”
Taken with a robust religious faith that hasn’t been reduced in the name of unity to feeling a sense of purpose, comments about heavenly brotherhood with aliens are silly and interesting, not threatening. But without it, they point toward an affinity between the form of Catholicism and the mildly beating heart of loving, smiling, pitying, coddling, pondering Pantheism.
James, this is a lot to get through on a Thursday. But I promise I will respond.
— Michael Brendan Dougherty · May 15, 02:02 PM · #
re: Nietzsche “ditching” Protestantism… I always thought of Protestant moral psychology as the most distilled form of the ‘bad conscience’, and so the major target of revaluation in the Genealogy. Augustine-as-read-by-Calvin, Calvin himself, and most of all, Kant.
— matt · May 15, 02:54 PM · #
You actually have no idea what Buddhism is, do you?
— Steven Donegal · May 15, 04:20 PM · #
Could you and Mr. Brooks and anyone else commenting on this subject please stop using ‘Buddhism’ to describe changes in Western religions? Nothing of what you are describing sounds like Buddhism. “Picturing yourself sailing on the sea of Yes” sounds New Age, not Buddhist. I understand that it’s easy to get the two confused and many Western Buddhists don’t help the situation. Still, I don’t think you can confuse the Prajna Paramita with “loving, smiling, pitying, coddling, pondering Pantheism.”
— e · May 15, 04:23 PM · #
James: “The topic at hand is the continuing scientific reinforcement of the vague, secularized, cosmic spirituality with which Yankee Protestantism replaced itself.”
I’ll grant that this is an interesting topic, but that’s not the topic at hand.
The topic at hand is what science undermines, not what it reinforces. Subversion rather than corroboration; subtraction rather than addition. What we are talking about — or what we should be talking about — is how science, in recent neuro-leaps and cognitive-bounds, is shrinking the size of the sandbox in which religion plays; and, therefore, is progressively limiting the size of the claims which can comfortably exist within it.
You can call that reinforcing, but I think it’s more like whittling.
— JA · May 15, 04:44 PM · #
JA: “science, in recent neuro-leaps and cognitive-bounds, is shrinking the size of the sandbox in which religion plays”
Of course, it’s also shrinking the sandbox within which individual free-will plays. And maybe that’s the real issue. There’s a direct correlation between belief in a God and belief in a Self.
The more we accede to a scientistic worldview, the more we place the locus of our primal impulses in forces outside ourselves. We can slough off a great deal of our personalities this way, but we can never completely lose the idea of ourselves as moral agents as long as we’re still human. I would argue that it’s the same for God—we can shrink him, but not down to nothing.
But ultimately, I think, the perceived conflict between science and faith, causality and agency, is an illusion, an artifact of bifurcated Enlightenment consciousness. If we can get past the either/or mentality and learn to see them as two complementary perspectives on the same process, we’d all be better off.
Or, I dunno, is that a “neural Buddhist” idea?
— Andy · May 15, 05:45 PM · #
Andy: “If we can get past the either/or mentality and learn to see them as two complementary perspectives on the same process, we’d all be better off.”
This reminds me of Bacon’s famous essay On Atheism, in which he writes, “It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” If we remain sufficiently broad in our definition of religion, I think this is true. Even at the greatest depths one remains in awe of the “music of the spheres.”
I also recall Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism, where he writes:
“Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.“
So, Andy, ultimately you’re right. The sandbox will never disappear (a fact scientists must concede and respect). However, because the sandbox is shrinking religion will continue to find certain, outsized claims challenged and indefensible ex post facto. Insofar as they can be restated and rebuilt — less the chaff, minus the fat — they can remain as legitimate, complementary truths alongside the more demonstrable variety. Insofar as they cannot, they should be relinquished, gracefully and gratefully, as truths which have gotten us this far, this way.
— JA · May 15, 06:14 PM · #
James, I realize you are focusing on American mainstream religion here, but I’m curious, where do you see Eastern Orthodoxy in this religious discussion? Admittedly, Orthodoxy has not been a central player in American religion, but it certainly is a big part of Christianity, and it seems like it’s been doing a decent job of converting Americans recently, at least in conservative intellectual quarters, from what I’ve seen.
Not trying to threadjack, but I thought this was a big omission from the discussion, particularly since (and forgive me if I am making inappropriate assumptions) you are of Greek descent and thus probably have more familiarity with Orthodoxy and its theology than most of the rest of us.
— Mark in Houston · May 16, 03:12 AM · #
I don’t know enough about Nietzsche to evaluate your interpretation, but I can say that you don’t seem to know much about Catholicism, or indeed the difference between eros, agape, and caritas (for a start).
I like the “All-Encompassing Magical Love Bubble” notion though; it amuses me. So that much at least you have accomplished!
— Martha · May 16, 04:09 PM · #
Mark, Orthodoxy was omitted from the discussion because actually I know zilch about it — very unfortunately. Martha, it’s true that I had to pick a snappy moniker and went with eros instead of agape or caritas, and I should get around to a more precise account of why. For now I’ll have to say mostly that the key to the ‘pantheist’ concept of love I’m trying to critique is the central place that it affords to physical love, ‘love in all its physicality’, and on the flipside not just ‘sex’ the physical act but ‘sexuality’, the lattice of attitudes, postures, fantasies, ambiguities, and hobgoblins of disembodied bodily love. I think both the corporeal emphasis and its spectral emanation can’t adequately be conveyed by agape or caritas talk, although certainly the type of pantheism I am intersted in critiquing has labored to trick eros into an abusive relationship with asexual compassion, with Michael Jacksonlike results.
— James · May 16, 05:55 PM · #
James, thanks for your response, and sorry if I made inappropriate assumptions.
There’s a lot to discuss in this essay, and I wanted to raise a couple of other questions. You’ve focused on a sort of Nietzschean critique of this sort of Eurobuddhism, for want of a better word, but I wonder if there might be some aspects to this viewpoint that Nietzsche might approve of. First of all, Nietzsche stressed the idea of creating one’s own value system, as opposed to succumbing to nihilism or a herd mentality, and he did not prescribe one single Nietzschean value system (if anything, his emphasis on a sort of aristocratic radicalism precluded a one-size-fits-all worldview). To the extent Eurobuddhism allows one to create one’s own system, could it be described as Nietzschean, at some level? Also, Nietzsche was a big fan of Emerson, and Emerson is in many ways the father of American Unitarian Universalism, a religion which is in many ways American Eurobuddhism in its purest form. While Nietzsche might not feel comfortable in a modern UU church (or any other church, for that matter), could the Emersonian/transcendentalist aspects of Unitarianism be interpreted as an evolution of the ideas that Nietzsche found beneficial in his time?
— Mark in Houston · May 16, 10:57 PM · #
Mark, you are on to a very very interesting tension. (And no faux pas committed, btw.) I think, for some of the reasons you’ve intimated, that this is why Nietzsche’s main legacy in the US has been almost completely benign. Our Neo-Nietzscheans, especially on the left, are American through and through – whereas Neo-Nietzscheanism carries with it a much different set of profound and complicated problems and implications for Europeans. Nietzsche underrated the way in which his doctrines could be domesticated; turns out it isn’t this vast gulf between blinking bourgeois and superman after all. The gulf is filled in with a vast but firm topography — including a patch of land occupied by Rorty, whose main contention basically was that the postmodern liberal bourgeois WAS the superman, the blazing star of human history upon whose fate we ought to bet our lives.
I find this all very fascinating, but I suspect that our American Neo-Nietzscheans are far too individualist and artistic-creative to wish for a future of open-ended biotechnology and a scientific faith of peaceful, happy feelings. To turn the will to truth upon ourselves and to turn the will to science upon ourselves are two very different things. To the extent that Nietzsche’s legacy is both anti-religious and anti-science, I expect that a high bourgeois American cult that seeks to reconcile religion and science into the most abstract democratic equality possible will send shudders through Nietzsche’s heirs.
— James · May 17, 01:31 PM · #
“Our Neo-Nietzscheans, especially on the left, are American through and through – whereas Neo-Nietzscheanism carries with it a much different set of profound and complicated problems and implications for Europeans.”
That really is a key point, and not just for Nietzschean thought. It seems like ideas take root in Europe and the US in utterly different ways, often much to the chagrin of Europeans. I wonder if sometimes the anti-Americanism (which isn’t as bad as a lot of people like to say it is, however) that one hears from European intellectuals is the result of them looking at our culture and saying, with great frustration, “It’s not supposed to work like that! If you read these books and take these ideas seriously, it’s not supposed to work like that!” I particularly think that’s the case for ideas from Germanic intellectuals.
Here’s a case in point. In Houston, like many cities, we have a Jung Center, which promotes the ideas of C.G. Jung. It’s in a great building in a prime location in Houston, with a cool bookstore, library and art gallery. It’s been in existence since 1958, so it’s not some recently created New Age movement center, and it’s been funded for years by Houston’s affluent classes. The thing about it is, if you look at the course selection, lectures, etc., you get a lot more of the softer, Esalen Jung vs. the harder, Euro-pagan Jung. Lots of yoga, not much Wotan, in other words.
Leaving aside whether you think Jungianism is a worthy intellectual or psychological movement or not, this is an example of the tension you’re discussing, I think, because it’s not clear who is really right here. An old German Jungian who knew the master before he died might be appalled by what he would see in Houston. But he may also be completely wrong in his analysis, because his views on what Jungianism should imply are informed by cultural currents that don’t exist here, and never will. Hence, a the tension you discuss.
Anyway, this has been a great back-and-forth, and I hope you continue to write more about this sort of thing. It’s a lot more interesting than the political horserace, though I enjoy that, too.
— Mark in Houston · May 17, 06:26 PM · #
James:
I am REALLY concerned about your failure to address the following Buddhist splinter groups:
1) Neo-Spinozist Antinomian Libertarians;
2) Post-Lockian Pan-Love-ists;
3) Neo-Darwinian Michael (Andrew?) Jacksonians;
4) Lawlerian Sentimentalist Neocons;
5) McArdlite Post-Lib Love-Econ-Cons;
6) Brooksian Pop-Soc Flail-Cons;
AND MOST OF ALL
Beard-Stroking Post-Liberal Culture-Cons.
I need to understand how all These Types fit into your system, dear boy.
Yours,
John Adams
— John Adams · May 17, 10:13 PM · #