Last week’s post here on The Archdruid
Report was, as some of my readers grasped, more than an attempt to
imagine the far future without reference to the contemporary folk mythologies
of progress and apocalypse—though it was also that, of course. In particular, I
hoped to evoke from my readers a specific response or, rather, two precisely
opposite responses: the two sides of a fault line along which the tectonic
pressures of the collective imagination are pressing toward crisis.
The results were as good as I could have hoped. Some of
those who read last week’s account of a future without limitless progress, to
be sure, found the prospect unbearably dismal. The most vocal spokesperson for
that point of view was, unexpectedly enough, SF writer David Brin, who
contributed a fine thumping tirade—helpfully posted
to his own blog as well as this one—full of the sort of “if you
disagree with me, you’re just being negative” rhetoric most often used these
days to market Ponzi schemes and perpetual-motion devices. Still, he also took
the time to characterize the narrative as an infuriatingly gloomy “paean to
despair.” Though nobody else seems to have felt quite the same need to bluster
about it, a number of other readers expressed similar reactions.
What makes this fascinating to me is that a rather larger
number of my readers had the opposite reaction. A vision of a future in which
civilizations, species and worlds follow life cycles like those of all other
natural things didn’t leave them furious or depressed. Their comments instead
featured such words as “comforted,”
“delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such
feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of humanity’s overinflated
ambitions, but there’s something rather more significant going on here. Not one
of the readers who made these comments made gloating remarks about the fate of
humanity or the Earth. Rather, what comforted, delighted, and awed them was the
imagery of Nature’s enduring order and continuity that I wove throughout the
narrative, and brought to the tightest focus I could manage in the last two
paragraphs.
This division is one I’ve been observing for quite some time
now. It so happens that my unpaid day job as the head of a contemporary Druid order
brings me into contact with a tolerably large number of people who fall more
generally on the latter side of the division I’ve just traced: whose sense of
wonder and instinct for reverence are far more readily roused by the order of
Nature, and their own necessary participation in that order, than it is by the
overturning of natural order that plays so crucial a role in the theist and
civil religions of mainstream Western culture. It so happens, for that matter,
that I find myself consistently on that side of the division I’ve just traced.
Reflecting on my own sense of alienation from the conventional religiosity of our
time, and on what I’ve learned from the many other people who experience a
similar alienation for similar reasons, I’ve come to believe that what’s going
on is the emergence, for the first time in more than two thousand years, of a
genuinely new religious sensibility in the western world.
A religious sensibility isn’t a religion. It’s the
substructure of perceptions, emotions and intuitions on which religions are
built, and to which religions owe both the deep similarities that link them to
other faiths of the same general age and historical origin, and the equally
deep divides that separate them from faiths of different ages and origins.
Between the tendency of modern religions to insist loudly on their uniqueness, on the one hand, and the
opposed tendency of modern irreligion to run all religions together into a
formless blur, on the other, the concept of distinct religious sensibilities is
a difficult one for many people nowadays to grasp; the best way to make sense
of it is to glance back over the emergence of the religious sensibility that
currently dominates the western world.
If you had the chance to survey the religious landscape of
the western half of Eurasia and North Africa two or three millennia ago, unless
you happened to be looking in some very obscure corners, you would find very
few similarities to the religious institutions, practices, and ideas of today.
People didn’t belong to congregations that met regularly inside buildings to
pray together; questions concerning life after death weren’t a big deal for
most people, and nobody wasted time waiting for the end of the world; sacred
scriptures in the modern sense were distinctly rare, next to nobody claimed
that a god had created the universe, and even the most devout believers in one
deity freely conceded that other deities existed and deserved the reverence of
their own worshippers.
The core religious institution of that era was the temple, a
house for the deity rather than a meeting place for worshippers—rituals in the
old temple cults took place out in front in the open air, not inside—and the
core ceremony was sacrifice, in which worshippers invited the presence of a
deity for a feast and quite literally “killed the fatted calf” to supply the
main course for divine and human participants alike. (Food storage technology
being what it was at that time, that was the way you provided meat for any
honored guest.) The status of priests varied from one part of the western world
to another, but in most places they were elected or hereditary officials set
apart from the laity only in the most pro forma sense, and you didn’t have to
be a priest to perform a sacrifice.
Behind all the richness and diversity of the religious life
of the time was a distinctive sensibility, one that saw the cosmos as a
community to which gods and men both belonged. The modern notion of equality
had no more place in their cosmos than it did in any other ancient community,
but the sharp differences in rights and responsibilities didn’t prevent every
member of the community from having a share in its collective life and
benefits. That sensibility once had the force of revelation; the Jews, for
example, were late adopters of the temple cult, and the awe and wonder palpable
in Solomon’s prayer at the consecration of the temple of Jerusalem (II
Chronicles 6) conveys something of the power of a religious vision in which
gods could “in very deed dwell with men on the earth.” It was by way of that
emotional power that the sensibility of the temple cults superseded a still older
sensibility whose traces can just be made out in the oldest strata of Western
religious traditions.
Still, by 600 BCE or so, the initial power of that vision
had long since settled into a comfortable routine of thought and practice, and
by 600 BCE or so, in turn, the first stirrings of a new and very different
religious sensibility were starting to appear.
Orphism in the Greek-speaking communities of the Mediterranean basin and
the earliest forms of Buddhism in India rejected the celebration of life’s good
things in the community of gods and men, and offered in its place a radically
different vision—a vision of salvation from the natural world and the human
condition itself, available to an elite few willing to embrace a life of
radical austerity and spiritual practice.
Then and long thereafter, this was a fringe phenomenon that
appealed only to a tiny minority of intellectuals. Most people either believed and practiced as
their great-grandparents had, or settled into fashionably up-to-date materialist
philosophies that discarded belief in gods without stirring the smallest
fraction of a cubit from the religious sensibility that underlay the
traditional faiths. Still, the new sensibility spread into popular culture as
the years passed.
You can track its spread by the way that robust traditional
celebrations of human sexuality gave way to shamefaced discomfort with the
facts of reproduction. Many Greek religious processions, for example, carried
large wooden penises as emblems of the gods’ gifts of fertility and delight; by
the time Greek philosophy was a going concern, intellectuals were muttering
excuses about symbols of the abstract progenitive power of the divine
principles to justify to themselves a tradition with which they were obviously
uncomfortable. Attitudes toward
sexuality of the sort that we now call “Victorian” found an increasingly public
voice as the new sensibility spread, though here again most people simply
rolled their eyes and did what they and their great-great-grandparents had always
done.
The great breakthrough of the new religious sensibility took
place over the half-millennium after 200 CE, as three great religious
movements—Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Buddhism—democratized the older
vision of salvation for an elite, by proclaiming faith in a uniquely holy
person and his doctrine as a valid substitute for the lifelong austerities and
spiritual disciplines of the older tradition. The shift was never total;
ordinary members of all three movements were expected to take up certain
practices and austerities, of the sort that could be pursued alongside an
ordinary lifestyle, and all three also evolved roles for those who aspired to
the total immersion of the older tradition (monks and nuns in Christianity and
Buddhism, Sufis in Islam). By that time the new sensibility had become
sufficiently widespread that throwing open the doors of salvation to all and
sundry got an enthusiastic response.
It’s indicative of how deeply the new sensibility had
percolated through the society of the age that by the time Christianity began
its final rise to power in the Roman world, its Pagan rivals were as deeply
committed to the idea of salvation from the human condition as their Christian
rivals. The writings of late Pagan intellectuals such as Iamblichus and the
Emperor Julian show as much discomfort with sexuality and physical embodiment
as those of their Christian contemporaries; what differentiated the two was
simply that the Pagan writers defended the older, elitist conception of
salvation for those who earned it by austerity and spiritual practice, against
the new vision of salvation by faith, and made common cause with what was left
of the old temple cults because those had long been a focus of Christian
animosity. Their rearguard action failed, though its literary remains became a
lasting resource for those who never did fit in with the new sensibility—or,
more to the point, with the specific institutional forms that the new
sensibility took in its cultural and historical contexts.
A religious sensibility, after all, is not a monolithic
thing, and its expressions are even less so.
In Europe and the European diaspora, the division between more elitist
and more democratic visions of salvation became an enduring fault line, to be
joined by the divide between centralized and collective concepts of spiritual
authority, on the one hand, and between more this-worldly and more otherworldly
concepts of salvation on the other.
Fault lines of comparable importance, though radically different nature,
ran through the older religious sensibility as well, and can be traced in the
very different religious sensibilities of regions outside western Eurasia and
the Mediterranean basin.
For that matter, older religious sensibilities and their
institutional forms can quite often find a way to survive in the interstices of
the new; consider the way that Shinto, a temple-centered polytheism of the
classic kind, has been able to hold its own for more than fifteen centuries in
Japan side by side with Mahayana Buddhism. The repeated revivals of Pagan
worship in the western world from the late Middle Ages to the present suggests
that the same thing could as well have happened in Europe and the European
diaspora, if violent intolerance along religious lines had been less of an
issue there. The point that needs making here is that the dominance of a
religious sensibility is never total; even when a great majority of people take
the presuppositions of a given sensibility for granted as unchallengeable
truths, there are always those who don’t fit in, whose personal sense of the
sacred pulls them in directions outside the accepted religious sensibility of
their age: some toward sensibilities that have been dominant in the past,
others toward sensibilities that may potentially play the same role in the
future.
It’s important, it seems to me, not to impose the
traditional folk mythology of progress onto these shifts from one religious
sensibility to another. Of course it’s
been a rhetorical strategy common to many modern religions to do exactly this,
and to portray the replacement of the old temple cults by the new religions of
salvation as a great leap forward in human progress. Still, that strategy runs
serious risks. There’s always the danger that some more recently minted theist
religion will play the same card, and argue that just as Paganism was replaced
by Christianity, say, Christianity ought to be replaced by the latest, hottest,
newest revelation, whatever that happens to be. There’s also the considerably
greater danger that atheists will make exactly the same argument. This latter
has been a valuable weapon in the atheist arsenal for centuries now, and it
gets much of its power by drawing on the same arguments monotheist religions
used against their polytheist predecessors. As an edged joke common in Neopagan
circles these days puts it, when you’ve already disbelieved in all the other
gods, what’s one more?
Still, the contemporary quarrels between atheists and
theists, like the equally fierce quarrels between the different theist
religions of salvation, take place within a shared sensibility. It’s
indicative, for example, that theists and atheists agree on the vast importance
of what individuals believe about basic religious questions such as the
existence of God; it’s just that to the theists, having the right beliefs
brings salvation from eternal hellfire, while to the atheists, having the right
beliefs brings salvation from the ignorant and superstitious past that fills
the place of eternal damnation in their mythos. That obsession with individual
belief is one of the distinctive features of the current western religious
sensibility; in the heyday of the old temple cults, while acts of impiety
toward sacred objects or ceremonies would earn a messy death in short order,
nobody cared about what opinions individuals might have about details of
religious doctrine, and thinkers could redefine the gods any way they wished so
long as they continued to show proper respect for holy things and holy seasons.
The hostilities between Christianity and contemporary
atheism, like those between Christianity and Islam, are thus expressions of
something like sibling rivalry. Salvation from the natural world and the human
condition remains the core premise (and thus also the most important promise)
of all these faiths, whether that salvation takes the supernatural form of
resurrection followed by eternal life in heaven, on the one hand, or the
allegedly more natural form of limitless progress, the conquest of poverty,
illness, and death, and the great leap outwards to an endless future among the
stars. It’s precisely the absence of those common assumptions, in turn, that
makes communication so difficult across the boundary between one religious
sensibility and another. The gap in understanding that reduced an intelligent
man like David Brin to spluttering fury at the suggestion that salvation might
not be waiting for humanity out there among the stars is exactly parallel to
the one that drove normally tolerant Roman thinkers to denounce the early
Christians as “enemies of the human race.”
Still, the fact remains that to a growing number of people
nowadays, promises of salvation from the natural world and the human
condition—whether that salvation takes the more traditional form of eternal
life in a supernatural realm or a more contemporary form decked out with
spaceships and jetpacks—fail to evoke the emotional responses they get from
participants in the older religious sensibility. It’s not merely that these
promises no longer ring true, though in many cases that’s also an issue; it’s
that they no longer have any appeal. What stirs awe and wonder in these people,
rather, is a sense of belonging and of participation in the great cycles of
Nature, an awareness of oneness with life that does not shrink in terror from
life’s natural completion in death. What
inspires them is not the hope of a final separation from the realities of
nature, life, history and time, but a conscious and delighted participation in
these realities—not the promise of salvation, but the reality of homecoming.
The emergence of this new religious sensibility has been, as
such things always are, a gradual process. Historian of religions Catherine
Albanese in her useful 1990 study Nature Religion in America
has traced it back in American religious life to colonial times, and its roots
in older European cultures go back considerably further still. That said, it
seems to me that the last few decades have seen the new religious sensibility
approach something like a critical mass.
It’s become much more common than it once was for me to encounter other
people who, as I do, find more cause for reverence in the curve of a grass
blade in the wind or the dance of energies through an ecosystem than in the
dubious claims of past miracles offered by theist religions or the equally
dubious promises of future miracles made so freely by the civil religion of
progress.
If I’m right, and the new religious sensibility I’ve
outlined in this essay will play a significant role in the religious
imagination of the western world in the decades, centuries, and millennia to
come, a case could be made that its emergence is timely. More than any other
single factor, the civil religion of progress helped to drive the weird
astigmatism of the collective imagination that makes blind faith in vaporware
seem like a reasonable response to the converging crises of our age, and
convinces so many people that the only possible thing to do in a blind alley is
to keep stomping on the accelerator in the vain hope that the brick wall in
front of them must surely give way.
