Christian Harmonistics

What follows is the Preface from my Christian Harmonistics:  The Analogy and Collision Between Mythic Theology and Biblical Truth in the Apologists, Medieval Poets, and Mythographers, soon to appear (Deo volente) in bookstores everywhere…

 

Origen’s method of biblical interpretation has been associated in the controversies of the Church with that radical wing of Christian hermeneutics which practised an extreme form of allegory known as “allegorism”.  But allegory, in general, is a subversive instrument–when it is not directed at the sacred writings of a rival culture.  In the Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville defined allegory as “saying one thing to mean another”.[1]  Since in the Bible it is the Deity who is presumed to be speaking, positing what is in the Divine Mind is a Promethean adventure.  The first allegorist, according to the terms of the definition that Isidore bequeathed to the Middle Ages, was certainly Satan, who decrypted the divine equivocation for Adam in Eden, arguing that what God had said of the Tree of Knowledge and its toxic fruit He did not literally mean.  (Amongst the more fundamentalist biblical exegetes of the Reformation, allegory was indeed often condemned as “Satanic”.)  With regard to the biblical Eden story, Origen is, as we shall see, not satisfied even with Satanic convolutedness:  he cannot find in his armour of faith a defence against the relevant doubts, specifically, the doubts of a Greek philosopher who is loath to imagine that the Divine Being could have, like some common gardener, planted a palpable tree in some physical garden in the first place.  For Origen, the story of the Garden of Eden is what we in the post-twentieth-century world would call a myth; it has less value as a statement of literal, empirical fact than as a poetic model of invisible processes that unfold, as Origen is prone to say, “inwardly”.  It is a statement, that is, not of historical but (in Jung’s phrase) of “psychic reality”:  the reality comprised of contents and dynamisms located in the interior world of every man, including the biblical reader.

The searing recognition that one’s hieros logos is a myth–a poetic fiction, symbolic perhaps, but not a record of something that has taken place in the external world of space and time–is undoubtedly the epochal discovery of modern man.  In his popular collection of essays, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung has anatomized the perilous condition of a civilization that has once and for all left the cocoon of historical fideism.[2]  Modern man will apparently no longer accept traditional religious propositions that he cannot directly verify for and in himself.  In place of belief, he demands knowledge; in place of second-hand faith in distant deeds or remote metaphysical entities, he requires private and immediate experience.  In short, modern man seems no longer capable of sustaining any conviction in the literal-historical truth of his ancestral narratives, which he now regards as less akin to history than to poetry, projected psychology, or myth.  And with the loss of the sacred text as history impends the loss of his soul.

 

For a Christian civilization, having so to adjust the status of the sacred text is an especial calamity.  Christian apologetics was initially founded upon and continues to proclaim the rudimentary distinction between the sacred text as history (empirical reality; truth) and the sacred text as myth (psychogenic fantasy; poetic fiction).  Whereas the hieros logos of an antecedent paganism consisted in myths (i.e., falsehoods), the narratives of the Christian Bible were said by the early Fathers to describe true and actual empirical events; whereas the ancient Greeks and Romans had circulated many stories about the miraculous deeds of god-men, their virgin births, passions, and resurrections, etc., only such accounts as are recorded in the Gospels can be credited as having actually happened.  The exclusive historical truth of the Bible was, and continues to be, Christianity’s primordial validating argument, as historical truth has also been the permanent benchmark against which rival religions have been, one by one, judged and disqualified.  In the Christian West, religious consciousness is indistinguishable from historical consciousness; it is axiomatic in Christian thinking that authentic religious experience must be founded upon a sacred text that records historical truth, and that assent to the historical truth of biblical events is the necessary condition of salvation.

Today, however, such theological first principles are everywhere under attack.  Since the publication of Frazer’s Golden Bough and Jung’s Symbols of Transformation shortly after the turn of the last century, such analogies as the Fathers once drew between pagan fables and biblical stories, for the polemical purpose of emphasizing the ontological distance that separated them, have been enthusiastically and systematically drawn again, to a decidedly different effect.  These comparisons tend now rather to collapse the distinction between sacred history and myth than throw it into relief.  Deciphering in that history what are manifestly mythopoetic patterns, in the modern era our thinking has undergone a Copernican revolution in the understanding of the sacred text, as the centre and creative source of religious narrative have been repatriated from the Divine Mind to the human psyche.  Sacred history no longer has for us the transcendent and spontaneous objectivity of the Divine, but the predictable subjectivity of the human.  It is seen now as a human artifact, obedient to all of the conventions and prejudices of human cultural history, psychology, and art.  This revaluation has in turn brought with it a typological inversion of sorts.  What in the mythic analogues to biblical history the Fathers identified as mere prefigurative types–in themselves empty shadows, significant only insofar as they have been divinely provided to show the way to, by reflecting the Light of Christian Truth–today are seen as archetypes, the formative paradigms that have culturally and psychologically shaped and organized the biblical accounts.  And whereas in another age we looked upward to the divine world (as the First Cause and Source of the biblical revelation) for the secret meanings of the sacred text, we now look backward to the antecedent mythic archetypes, and inward to the human psyche in which they primordially reside.

Today, our educated and critical consciousness is about the task of applying the Apologists’ measure of historical veracity to the Christian story itself, finding it to be in all of its theological essentials–as the Fathers had found the ancestral narratives of Graeco-Roman paganism to be–a “myth”.  In spite of the resolute “search for the historical Jesus”, the central categories of Christian revelation (God-man, Virgin Birth, Passion, Resurrection, etc.) stubbornly defy historical analysis.  The historical imagination can apparently neither prove nor disprove them, as the religious imagination refuses at the same time to see them superannuated.  Having established historicity as the principal test and criterion of spiritual validity, Christianity may be thus in the process of scrupulously invalidating itself.  If this spiritual disaster is to be averted, the Church has no choice, in the opinion of some of her recent critics, but to learn to think about the sacred text differently from the ways in which she has traditionally done so.  Though she once rejected the mythic or poetic theology of paganism, the critical consciousness of modern man, in combination with the Church’s own historicist imperatives, may be conspiring to impose upon her a new, but also, it will be argued here, a very old kind of theology.  Old, because an approach to the Christian revelation as myth, indeed a characteristically pagan mythopoetic theology, has always been practised within the early and medieval Christian Church, though it has remained in the shadow of an antithetical theology of biblical historicism.

 

In tracing the roots of a Christian mythic theology, the modern man might look first of all to the tradition of late-antique Hellenism, of which the second-century Apologists were the natural inheritors.  The problem that Hellenism posed for the Church was, of course, never solved.  The reconciliation, within the framework of orthodox Christian belief, of the teachings of Platonic and Stoic philosophy or the immemorial symbols of Hellenistic mystery religion with an historical theology based upon the Bible was, like squaring the circle, an ongoing project of the Western mind.  Yet, looking back upon third-century Alexandria, twelfth-century Chartres, or fifteenth-century Florence, one observes that it was in the alchemy between “Plato” and “Moses” that some of the most remarkable epiphanies of Western intellectual culture occurred.

Like their Alexandrian forerunner Philo Judaeus, Clement and Origen are proverbially said to have attempted to effect a marriage between Plato and Moses, and more generally to reconcile the mythological theologies of Greek paganism with the historical theology that had been handed down to Christianity, along with the Bible, from the Hebrews.  But this marriage was an uneasy one, arranged as it had been between partners who had deep and fundamental disagreements.  Origen, in this regard, may be viewed as an emblem of his age, a figure in whose person and work was deposited a contradiction buried deep in the unconscious of Christianity itself.  Like the second-century Apologists, Origen ingenuously professed to be a Christian, while his writings betrayed him as a devout of the circumambient Orpheo-Platonic mythology and soteriology of the late-antique pagan world.

By the end of the first century A.D., Orpheo-Platonic, Stoic, Neo-Pythagorean, and Gnostic myths and doctrines had been interlarded into an eclectic and unified system of thought–a “universal philosophy”, as late paganism had regarded it–significant and untransmuted lumps of which remained unmetabolised in early Christian theology, and would continue to be circulated in medieval poetry, philosophy, and biblical commentary.  By virtue of the early Church’s appropriation of the dominant themes of this universal philosophy (late antiquity’s undiscarded image, to alter slightly C. S. Lewis’ phrase), pagan modes of spirituality were imported directly into Christian theology and literature, where they led an autonomous existence, next an antithetical religious vision rooted in biblical historicism.  In the Christian Apologists from Justin to Origen, pagan anthropologies and soteriologies unconsciously coexisted with or entirely pre-empted the mechanisms of Christian “salvation history”.  In their interpretations of the Bible, moreover, the Fathers blithely read ancient pagan conceptions of the world and the soul into the scriptural texts.  It is a notable irony–ironic, because Christian allegorical commentary is normally thought of as imposing Christian meanings upon the pagan writings–that in the early and medieval Christian periods the Bible was often provided with an allegorically imposed pagan significance.

 

In the presence of such ambiguities, scholarly attempts to identify the original historical core of the Christian religion seem doomed to failure.  Mythological theologies and theosophies such as Gnosticism, Middle and Neo-Platonism, and Neo-Pythagoreanism (not that such distinctions are easily made) have been conventionally regarded as impurities foreign to Christianity (hence the enduring need to “reconcile”).  Gnosticism, in all of its florid permutations, is an official heresy, denounced by the Church with especial vehemence; and ever since the fateful conversion of Saint Augustine, Platonism has been looked upon as a delusory pagan temptation to be outgrown.  The Church’s energetic opposition to these forms of thought is easily comprehended, as they contradict almost all of the fundamental historical premises of Christian biblical theology.

Nonetheless, Orthodoxy has made an accommodation with these antithetical theologies of paganism, even as the Church has striven officially to obliterate them.  Though formally excommunicated from the orthodox choir, doctrines, myths, and images from Gnosticism and Platonism have never ceased to strike within it notes of clarity and spiritual power.  For every Gnostic thinker, like Marcion or Valentinus, made notorious and quiescent by the Church’s anathema, there were dozens of venerable Christian poets (Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille), philosophers and exegetes (Gregory of Nyssa, Boethius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, John the Scot, William of Conches), and Church theologians, including many of the Fathers themselves, whose mythic and theosophical speculations, peremptorily Christianized, perhaps, but unmistakably Gnostic and Platonic in inspiration, were allowed to stand without censure or notice, although in themselves they remained quite as subversive of the traditional biblical theology simultaneously preached by the Church.  In the presence of contradictions between a theology of true history and one of myth; between a soteriology of unmerited, God-bestowed grace and one of the self-sufficient rational intelligence; between a conception of man as inalienably flawed, helpless, earthly, and mortal (i.e., historical), and a conception of him as innately heavenly and divine; between an image of God as involved in all of the detailed sinuations of human history, who maintains constant, adaptive, and individual relations with men, and a Deity who is the impersonal Principle of a transcendent, immutable, and simultaneously intrinsic natural Order, the Church has taken a position of calculated insouciance–so long as these opposites were contained within the corpus of a Christian thinker who wore her official imprimatur.

 

Throughout the centuries of Christian scholarship, the contradiction at the core of Christianity, between a theology that arises from an historical and another from a mythological milieu, does not seem to have been thoughtfully confronted.  Like the early Christian Apologists themselves, neither religious historians nor medieval literary critics have been alert to the unconverted vigour of antithetical pagan themes and images within the context of conventional biblical-historical theology, or considered the implication of such survivals and admixtures when confidently declaring an idea or doctrine to be “Christian”.  To put it mildly, Christian historiography has not been keenly attuned to ambiguity.

Since the nineteenth century, the greater part of European cultural history has been written around the romantic caricature of a “repressive” Church, anxious to keep the lid on a Dionysian cauldron bubbling with paganisms (the indigenous paganism of the “folk”, the intellectual paganism of Christian men of letters), and erupting inevitably (in the age of the troubadours, in the circles of “courtly love”, in the Renaissance, or the Romantic era) into a boil of atavistic sensuality on the one hand or nullifidian rationality on the other.  There have, thankfully, been agnostic challenges to this modern Christian historical myth.  Against the romantic caricature, D. W. Robertson, for example, has mobilized the full and formidable weight of his erudition, arguing that medieval literature and art were invariably didactic excrescences of the Christian religion, and that they were invariably didactic of Christian attitudes and ideas.[3]

But this view now strikes many medievalists as an over-correction.  For Professor Robertson the Middle Ages was by definition an Augustinian age, and the medieval attitude to paganism was defined according to the Augustinian obligation that wherever the ancient vessels of “Egyptian silver and gold” were allowed into the narthex of Christian consciousness, they had first to be emptied of the dregs of pagan falsehood and refilled with the wine of Christian truth.  In this context, Robertson has directed his readers to the rich medieval tradition of commentary on the classics.  Here, the pagan myths are allegorically “Christianized”:  transformed into exempla of Christian morality, symbols of Christian dogmas, or anticipatory types of Christian biblical history, or in some other manner invested with Christian meanings.  In this way, the entire pagan past was effectively neutralized, converted into a redundant image of Christianity itself.

That this represents a rooted habit of the medieval mind is undeniable.  But it does not tell the whole story of the Christian Middle Ages.  For in identifying the Middle Ages with Augustinian orthodoxy, it can be observed that Professor Robertson did not very often refer to such un-Christianized pagan myths and philosophical doctrines as informed the thinking of the second-century Apologists, the Alexandrian or Cappadocian Fathers, or Boethius, or found their way into the scriptural paraphrases of early Christian and medieval poets, or the cosmological verse of the Platonists of Chartres.  In these and many other influential early Christian and medieval repositories, the elements of a candidly pagan theology stood in no apparent relation to formal Christian teachings; and paying little tribute to the Christian Bible–in fact, often making no reference to it whatever–this theology stood rather as an independent and self-contained system of belief.  Nor do the scriptural enucleations of Origen or Gregory of Nyssa fall readily into line with Augustinian principles of allegory when, in pulling out of the hat of the biblical istoria the rabbit of traditional pagan philosophical doctrines and myths, they might be better said to have converted Judaeo-Christian gold and silver to Egyptian use.

Recently, Thomas Molnar has written an important book about Christianity’s perduring nervousness, lasting from ancient times through contemporary, in the face of the “pagan temptation”.[4]  But in locating the pagan temptation either hard outside the gates of Orthodoxy or finding no pagan temptation at all, romantic and Augustinian theories of Christian history may have substantially distorted our understanding.  It is arguable that the real contest between paganism and Christianity has taken place within the minds and writings of Christian theologians, exegetes, and poets themselves, though they, like the official Church, do not seem to have been discomposed by the fact that biblical-historical and Greek mythological ideas logically exclude one another.  In a kind of inner debate, Christian thinkers have taken both sides of the argument, without apparently knowing that an argument is taking place.  The Christian religion has in this way almost always been a schism of two distinct theologies, coexisting in a sort of conjunctio oppositorum.  But institutional unconsciousness of this opposition has remained the norm, and it has had consequences of more than academic significance.  For it has cheated the Church of an understanding of how her traditional theological assumptions have always been compensated by their opposites, and of why this needed to be so; and in the wake of a general breakdown of ancestral faith (especially faith in the “historical truth” of the Bible), it may be blinding the Church today to ways of reading the sacred text and thinking about the process of salvation that she still hesitates to confess are native Christian ways.

 

[1]               “Allegoria est alieniloquium, aliud enim sonat, et aliud intelligitur.” (Et. I, xxxvi [“De tropis”], p. 17, col. 1 B)  My text of Isidore is Sancti Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi opera omnia quae extant (Paris:  Laurentius Sonnius, 1601).

[2]               C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Carl F. Baynes (New York:  Harcourt, Brace & World, 1933).

[3]               See A Preface to Chaucer:  Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton:  Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), passim, but especially the Introduction.

[4]               The  Pagan Temptation (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Wm. Eerdmanns, 1987).