cardboard adolescent

Mary Moody Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You most beloved of ministers, who seemed formed by face, manner & pen to copy & illustrate the noblest of all institutions, are you at war with that angelic office?... Now if this withering Lucifer doctrine of pantheism be true, what moral truth can you preach or by what authority should you feel it? Without a personal God you are on an ocean mast unrigged for any port or object."

This quotation raises several important points. The first is the specific relation of pantheism to Christianity, whether the two are mutually exclusive--pantheism reflecting the pride of Satan and an overestimation of the ego, where Christianity works to instill a sense of worthlessness--you were made from nothing after all, or, if perhaps pantheism is simply a deeper understanding of Christianity which is hidden from all but a few--"the kingdom of Heaven is within," "I am in God and He is in me"... For one thing this tension calls attention to the essential ambiguity of scripture, and its openness to interpretation. One could also argue that perhaps the different authors of the Bible had different spiritual views, and hence this dichotomy tends to be glossed over by the assumed continuity of the Bible.

There are pressing problems on both sides of this divide. Taking God as the Ultimate Other, the self-sustaining and self-moving, with pure being-for-self, and this corporeal universe as the nothingness set in motion by Its whim, how does one account for our 'ability' to sense Its presence? Is this even a personal God? After all, the idea of a 'personal' entity seems to derive to some extent from familial relations. One has to add a third term to the mind-body dualism, namely the soul, because if one can have a sensory experience of God, or fully understand God with the mind, this quickly succombs to pantheism since God would be nothing but the fullest expression of the mind and body. With the soul, we have an additional agency which is like God (made in His image) but which can only strive toward God, perhaps never reaching Him. In addition, part of this striving toward perfection involves rejecting the temptation of both mind and body. Again, however, pantheism looms. It would seem that the soul, being eternal, is only subject to diversity insofar as it experiences through the body and mind. Hence, though various souls might be on various stages toward perfection, in various bodies, without the diversity of the senses and perspectives, this can easily be interpreted as one soul diffracted through time and space. And, once this is admitted, God is again nothing more than the fullest expression of the soul, which, even if it seems to be infinitely removed from any particular stage, could simply be taken to be the essence of the soul outside space and time. And if we try to undo this by making God entirely unlike the soul, as Other as possible, the only route to God would be purely negative--ecstacy and the sublime would merely be distractions on the road to complete self-renunciation and a recognition of the nothingness of even the soul. Does Christianity offer such a radical perspective? Who would write it, and why?

Another important issue is the 'baselessness' of pantheism. After all, if everything is a part and expression of God, then not only is God good and evil, but everything He does He does merely to Himself. What basis, then, is there for ethical behavior? Hegel resolves this dilemma dialectically, Good can be taken as the positive (thesis) (analogous to being) and Evil as the negative (antithesis) (analogous to non-being) and as they play out their struggle Good ultimately prevails, that is to say, diversity collapses back into unity. The ethical standard, then, is to promote unity. However, as soon as this view has been systematized, it is easy to see how it succombs to tautology and absurdity. After all, it seems to say that the point of existence is for Spirit to become One (and stop torturing itself) but why then did Spirit ever cease to be One in the first place? It is a cyclical game which continues precisely because it never manages to justify itself, and must always flee from this justification. Fortunately, we do not experience this unfolding in purely rational terms. We experience it emotionally--we feel bliss in the union of lovers or tones or colors or forms, we feel horror and repulsion in the negative movement of decay and torture, we even bring ourselves to laugh in the face of the Absurd. Even if it is the same old story, even if it becomes more predictable and mundane as the cycle nears its end, we yearn with all our being for those few, fleeting moments of ecstacy and rebel with every ounce of our being in the face of Death.

Because the 'rational' dialectical movement is experienced subjectively, pantheism does give us a personal God, not one who sits beyond the world as its creator, but one who sits in the world, in our intersubjective relations, as the very epitome of their becoming. Further, he is personal because he is both terrible and wonderful, and makes no (impossible?) promises of eternal bliss. Rather, he is one who teaches us how to live, how to balance, and how to play. The Other God, the one who would lead us out of this world into Heaven, can only do so by teaching us how to die to this world. Both options strike the mind as paradoxical, but the Hegelian notion presents the paradox as that of the mind, whereas the latter aims at the dissolution of the mind altogether--He is ineffable, beyond comprehension.

The lack of justification for Spirit becomes clear in Idealism, for, just as we feel pressed to point beyond ourselves for justification for our actions, so too does Spirit seem incapable of justifying the cruel master/slave game it plays with itself. However, by positing an utterly transcendent God, we have not resolved this issue, we have merely deferred it. If our aim is to become like God, why did God create us unlike Himself? Why did He create us at all? The orthodox answer is that we cannot understand the will of God, but if we cannot do this, then he cannot be a personal God.

The dichotomy can be expressed in many different ways: Buddhism vs Hinduism (exiting samsara through nirvana vs realizing your inner God), Schopenhauer vs Nietzsche (renunciation of will vs will to power), etc. When crystallized, I cannot help but think that Christianity is hiding this issue, presenting an elaborate self-deception, rather than offering a clear answer. For now, I will side with Emerson, Nietzsche, William Blake, Hegel (sort of) and even Camus to an extent, and answer that though the game Spirit plays is absurd, it is precisely that, a game. It does not need any justification beyond itself, and in turn, neither do we.