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David B. Burrell, C.S.C.
Theodore Hesburg Professor
College of Liberal Arts and Letters
Notre Dame University
South Bend, Indiana
The Genesis story is used in different ways in our diverse traditions, but the two complementary elements remain central: the primal pair's vulnerability to the serpent's suggestion that to eat the forbidden fruit will make them "like god," and their spontaneous reaction to "the god's" confrontation: "not I but she; not I but the serpent!" My contention will be that we are all peculiarly susceptible to the temptation to be "like God," and furthermore, that we mask the incoherence of the ensuing pattern of actions even from ourselves by a policy of avoiding responsibility for our actions. That policy fosters ingrained habits of self-deception, which become the collective "built-in unawareness" that Jews recognize as the yetzer ra' and Christians elaborate as "original sin." Unawareness of our destiny is abetted by the distracting satisfactions which beset us from all sides. But those distractions are not of themselves idols; only when we invest them with ultimacy do they become god-substitutes. Indeed, I shall be arguing that the very activity of a God who reveals the Torah to a people to make them God's own, and who reveals God's own inaccessible face in Jesus as well as a "straight path" in the Qur'an, will inevitably spawn god-substitutes in the communities named. Why? Because such an overt revelation invites those who respond as Jews, Christians, and Muslims to live their lives as a journey of faith, yet nearly everything in us resists just that: living our lives as journeys of faith! I say "nearly everything," for there always remains that primordial link which Islam calls fitra, the intentional human nature created in God's image which cannot help but home in on "the good," however distorted, so can help us, in rare unguarded moments, to acknowledge our own deviance by recognizing the "straight path" as our native one. Even if we are singly and collectively unreliable, there is a trace in us all of that primordial connection with our divine source which is our very being.
The guide whom I shall be following in this diagnosis, a sixteenth-century Castillian poet and spiritual writer, John of the Cross, calls that homing instinct within us "the center of the soul," so offering a pregnant image for Aquinas' summary comment that our very being, as creatures, is "to be related" to the creator. Yet that interior relating, prior to any overt act of relating, is precisely what creates the difficulty for us so effectively dramatized (if recurrently misinterpreted) in Genesis 3. For we are pulled, it seems, by the very weight of our derived existence, to make a return to the One from whom we have received everything; indeed to return everything, if we can. Yet that very One eludes us, either as unnamable or endowed with a plethora of names; so we settle for one whom we can more easily name. And that one, by some innate preference tapped by the serpent's deceit, "eat it and you will be like gods," looks uncannily like ourselves: either myself as my own creation (Nietszche) or the body politic which can absorb most of my projections, the state.
For how else could we invest as much as we do in our own selves or in our national identities, unless we implicitly and quite unconsciously regarded these as the source of our very being to which we owe such wholehearted allegiance? That is the secret potency which turns minor sources of satisfaction into major idols, thereby scuttling Freud's attempt to trivialize human life into a series of "gratifications." For there are inbuilt limits to hedonism, and something in us recognizes that rather quickly, and moves us to look beyond "getting" for ourselves to a way of giving ourselves completely. And that was, of course, exactly what Freud feared: loss of the self (the ego) by submerging itself in the "oceanic feeling" which he identified with religion. So faith for Freud could only be idolatry, though he might grudgingly acknowledge love as "admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological."
Yet notice the instructive convolution here: the stricture against idolatry which Freud retained from his ancestral faith only functions, as we have seen, in a climate fertilized by the God-given impulse to return everything to one's transcendent source. But if everything we call 'god' is an idol, then there can be no idols, since there is no God for whom idols can substitute. And Freud must have implicitly seen this, so his campaign become one of so thoroughly secularizing our sense of ourselves that the impulse to return everything was transmuted into a simple desire to get every satisfaction. But as Woody Allen has never ceased to remind us, this strategy has not worked. And it has not worked because it moves in a direction diametrically opposed to the quest for transformation which Jung discovered to be built into our psyches: Freud would transmute the gold of aspiration into the lead of satisfaction!
Fr. David Burrell giving his presentation at the University of
St. Thomas.
Dr. Kenneth Seeskin, co-presenter, and Dr. John Merkle, moderator of the program, are
seated to the right.
So we are returned to the fitra, the buried yet operative "center of the soul," which will not be satisfied with gratification, but seeks that very source which it divines to be transcendent, a seeking which expresses itself in what Jung as identified as the inbuilt alchemical aspiration to transformation. All this is needed to appreciate the force of the biblical stricture against idolatry, as well as to comprehend why we tend to serving idols as the "default" position of our inbuilt orientation, and finally, why the activity it generates inevitably leads to violence--thereby apparently confirming Freud's judgment that religious faith can be nothing other than fanaticism.
As we consider why our exercise of this inbuilt tendency to express our creaturely relatedness will invariably lead us into idolatry as our human "default position" for faith, my guide here will be John of the Cross, but it could as easily be 'Obady’h Maimonides, the Sufi grandson of Moses ben Maimon, for each of these spiritual thinkers appropriated the reflections of their respective philosophical mentors, Thomas Aquinas and Maimonides, regarding the transcendence of the creator, translating our intentional response into a thoroughgoing journey of faith. Yet so thoroughgoing that we will each be tempted to flag along the way and invest the unlimited energies galvanized by revelation in something less, something we can comprehend and so (by definition) something less than God yet which we will call our god--so an idol.
Yet if idolatry is a default positon for Jews, Christians, or Muslims, how can we be alert to the fact that we are investing our God-given and God-drawn responses in something that is far less than God? The first and most telling indication will be a penchant for violence. For when we feel it necessary to engage in force to ensure that the ways of the Lord of the universe are being implemented, we ought rightly suspect that these are our ways and not God's. For the God of Genesis and of the Qur'an had only to speak, and the universe came into being; utterly unlike any contender "creator," who could establish the universe only after a bloody series of battles in which competitors were crudely dismembered. For these contenders, "pagan gods" so-called, were invariably made in our image. As Jesus put it, taking the opportunity to instruct his select band after the mother of two of them had infuriated the others by requesting favors for her two sons in Jesus' kingdom: "You know that among the pagans their so-called rulers lord it over them, and their great men make their authority felt. This is not to happen among you" (Mk10:42-43). We know how rulers rule; what Jesus is clarifying is that they rule as they conceive their so-called gods "lording it over" them; yet as these are not really gods, so they are not really rulers. So why should you want to imitate them, he asks us.
There are countless reasons, of course, and the nearly consistent inability of Christians to take Jesus' warning to heart underscores how powerful a default position idolatry is. For Jesus put it with unmistakable clarity: those who have recourse to force, subduing others as a way of realizing their aims, are following not the way of the creator of all but of a pagan god. And worse yet, if anyone should act that way in the name of the biblical or qur'anic God, they are falsifying God's name, substituting an idol of their manufacture--as indeed all idols are! Yet examples abound, and if the most flagrant is the Spanish inquisition, more contemporary examples come to mind when others assume political power, as with Jabotinsky-revisionist Zionists or Islamist groups intent on showing the power of the Qur'an in the face of western hegemony. We would prefer to launder these realities out of our history, as most Christians have done with the Crusades, treating them as aberrations, but what if our secular critics are right, and they do represent a tendency inherent in religion, or at least in the Abrahamic faiths? As you might suspect, I am inclined to agree with our critics here; indeed, that is what I mean by insisting that idolatry is a default position for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Yet if the God we would worship is God, and if our faith in that God is true, it must contain antidotes to the ways in which we are prone to infect it with our own ambitions? How can our traditions help us to avoid idolatry?
Once we have been courageous enough to hear our critics and put the question this way, we will be directed to those regions in our respective traditions where each of the Abrahamic faiths shows itself to be equipped to counter its endemic tendency to topple over into idolatry. My guide as a Christian will be John of the Cross; I have already suggested a Jewish counterpart, while al-Ghazali serves as a splendid Muslim witness. The stategies in question all direct us to ways in which we can wean ourselves from the god of our projections, and let God be God. Yet as attractive as that sounds, any recovering alcoholic will attest that it is an initially unwelcome invitation!
And if we do not readily identify with that group of people, we need to look again, for if we have ever taken up the ritual prescription of confessing our sins in earnest, we will have identified a personal addiction. And again, at its root will be our penchant for replacing God with an idol of our making. In John of the Cross's words, the step involves entrusting our lives to one who will guide us to make the response which intentional creatures are called to make: to return everything to the One from whom we have received everything. The name of this guide is faith; we are asked to live by faith rather than by our own lights. John will not let us dupe ourselves, however, for his experience with religious people makes him warn them especially that not all who say "Lord, Lord" are acting out of faith. To live by faith is to be open to hearing God's call in the most unlikely circumstances of our life, and to be alert to the ways in which we prefer to identify it with calls more gratifying to ourselves. In short, living by faith is a taxing enterprise; indeed, far more critical than the most thoroughgoing secular critique of faith. For such critiques can rest content with their own unexamined alternatives, as we know so well, whereas living by an Abrahamic faith requires the self-sacrifice of everything we regard as our own, as the arresting episode of the "binding of Isaac" reminds us so forcibly. For it was not, as it turned out, Isaac's life that the Lord was demanding, but that Abraham sever the attachment to Isaac as the bearer of his posterity; and to his followers: our attachment to our God!
John of the Cross calls this journey of faith one of purification, as indeed it is; al-Ghazali describes it as a series of stages in which we learn more and more to trust in the one God, and so bring ourselves to an operative faith in God's oneness--that feature of God which defies our intellectual grasp, as the rabbis have always insisted. In this way, we are invited to become authentic believers in one God, and so to respond to the imperative yet mysterious call to worship God alone. Practically, this means that we take time to pray, to let the scriptures--for Jews and for Christians, the psalms--shape our response to what is going on in our life. And this practice is not simply one of "continuing education," whereby we are taught yet more about our faith, but one which lets that faith take us over from within. The result will be a palpable sense of the power of God, and a correlatively less defensive posture with regard to our critics: we will feel less need to crush them, and find ourselves more open to their criticisms. For likely as not, they will serve our faith-journey well by ferreting out once more our endemic penchant to substitute our goals for God's.
Indeed, the ones with whom we will then have most difficulty are precisely those whom John identifies so clearly as inimical to faith: our co-religionists who substitute loyalty to a religious identity for faith, and especially those who cannot tell the difference. Yet even these we must tolerate, using all the resources of our respective traditions to delineate for them the difference between such loyalty and authentic faith, and do so as patiently as we can. For this activity is an integral part of our journey of faith, since none of us can be sure that we are journeying to the true God and are not in service of an idol, so critics will always be a blessing. At least, that is what it is like to be, in John's terms, on a journey of faith in response to the invitation of our God who is One: Shema O Israel ... (Dt 6:4). What John of the Cross is intent on removing is any hint that this God is ours, ours to do with as we will; ours to impose on others--even members of our own religious family--with a surety unworthy of people of faith. Yet that is precisely what we have identified as the penchant for idolatry, making it into an easy default positon for erstwhile "people of faith": that this God is ours, ever on our side. Indeed, that insistence is the surest indication that we have substituted a projection, a pagan god, for the "creator of heaven and earth and all that is between them" (Qur'an 25:59). Yet that God, the one in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims profess to believe, cannot be owned by any one of us, by any group among us, or by any of those groups themselves. Indeed, that is what our scriptures tell us!
We have been skirting a crucial subject: how to articulate the ineffable relation of creator to creation? And if is indeed ineffable, why even try to articulate it? The usual answer to that question is that we must try, for we shall do so in any case--just by speaking of God--and the very attempt to do so will alert us once again to our inbuilt penchant for idolatry! (This can be shown quite simply in reminding our selves that "theists" do not differ from atheists in the way that many atheists presume they do: in accepting one more item into their universe--indeed, a very large one which they call 'God'!) Now the obvious path to take in attempting a less inadequate articulation is to find a kind of half-way point between creation and creator: a role which the Torah can serve for Jews, the Qur'an for Muslims, and Jesus for Christians. Intermediaries abound, of course, as does our penchant to have recourse to them, for who can pretend to stand "before God," as Kierkegaard loves to put it? Indeed, who can "see the face of God and live?" The clearest sign of this can be found in popular Islam, which constantly invokes Muhammad as an intercessor, in the face of the repeated Qur'anic insistence that nothing, no one--even, especially, the Prophet--can be "associated with God."
How can that penchant for mediators avoid the default position of idolatry? Or is it simply an inevitable yet always reprehensible feature of popular Abrahamic faiths? I want to begin with a story and then show how an answer is adumbrated in the earliest Christian witness. The story comes from my participation in an Academy of Jewish Philosophy meeting on idolatry during the eighties. Steven Schwartzchild had just begun his opening address when I came in a bit late for the session. On seeing me enter the room, he turned to the organizers and complained: "Nobody told me Dave would be here." (I was at that time the only goy membver of the Academy.) So I responded: "What's the trouble, Steve?" To which he retorted: "I was just beginning a sustained argument designed to show that all Christians are idolaters." I managed an inspired response: "Steve, it took our community four hundred years to get straight about Jesus. I wouldn't expect you to do it in an evening!"
The witness can be found in the New Testament book attributed to Luke, the Acts of the Apostles. Peter is addressing "the rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, Jonathan, Alexander and all who were of the high-priestly family" with regard to the healing of a cripple: "let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth ..." Indeed, "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:5-6, 10-12). I cite this text, where an unlettered Peter is being presented in the rhetorical persona of a Hebrew prophet before the authorities, because its context makes clear the point which he wishes to make and must make: Jesus is the only creature whose name can be invoked as God's people have been invited to invoke the name of the creator of heaven and earth: "there is no other name under heaven among mortals ...." God alone is Lord of heaven an earth; no creature can pre-empt that role, yet Jesus' name calls forth a creator's power.
That this text has been regularly misused by some Christians to claim exclusive access to "salvation" offers another salient reminder of our shared penchant for ownership. What Peter is insisting is something quite different, and something about which he could say little more, for it took the Christian community four centuries to formulate it with clarity: the status of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet Peter's insistence, as incorporated into Luke's highly structured text, witnesses to the instinct which dominated the life and practice of Christians during that turbulent search for a formulation. John puts it most succinctly at the outset of his gospel: Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. Augustine reminds us that such an outcome was unimaginable to those people who had reflected most on the "word of God," the Neoplatonic philosophers. So Jesus can only be mediator if he is not "between" creator and creation; for there is no such place. He can only be mediator if he is--unimaginably--both, yet that can only be God's own work. For it reveals to us that "God's own Word" is in fact more than another "name" of God, more than a metaphor for God's intentional activity, but that there is articulation within the oneness of divinity--something we could never have suspected and which later Christian theologians like Thomas Aquinas will labor to show cannot compromise that unity which the rabbis celebrated.
An earlier witness, Hilary of Poitiers, notes how this revelation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit, explains as well our newfound unity with the creator: "this is why we are all one, because the Father is in Christ, and Christ is in us. He is in us through his flesh and we are in him. With him we form a unity which is in God. ... This is how he wanted us to understand the perfect unity that is achieved through our mediator, who lives in the Father while we live in him, and who, while living in the Father, lives also in us. This is how we attain unity with the Father. Christ is in very truth in the Father by his eternal generation; we are in very truth in Christ, and he likewise is in us. ... Since we who are in the flesh have Christ dwelling in us through his flesh, we shall draw life from him in the same way as he draws life from the Father." This longish quote should remind us that the so-called "doctrine of the Trinity" cannot be an arcane statement about the inner life of God, for that is strictly out of bounds for humans--even those who assume the mantle of theologians! It must rather be a way of formulating what the God who reveals the divine face in Jesus must be like to do such a thing, and remind us at the same time that the point of that revelation is to unite us creatures intimately with our creator; or as John the evangelist put it: "to gather into one the scattered children of God" (Jo 11:52). Those very aspirations can be found in Jewish mysticism, they suffuse Sufi writings and practices in Islam. Mediation without "something in between" or something inappropriately "associated with the one God"--that alone can satisfy the demand of Abrahamic faith, yet it is also something to which each of them aspires.