About a month ago I happened to be reading an essay entitled “The People’s Idea of God,” which was originally a lecture in Boston in 1886, by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Here’s one passage:
“Proportionately as the people's belief of God, in every age, has been dematerialized…has their Deity become good; no longer a personal tyrant or a molten image, but the divine Life, Truth, and Love …This more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations as well as individuals, and will lift man ultimately to the understanding that our ideals form our characters, that as a man ‘thinketh in his heart, so is he’."
The conviction that our ideas and thoughts produce our experience was shared by the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said in a lecture in Boston in 1842: “All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought…You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from what they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy.”
Mr. Emerson and Mrs. Eddy were characteristic children of 19th century New England, raised in its bracing Protestant individualism but eager for a new age marked by science and emancipation. They were also contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln, and if anyone was an example of someone who made his own circumstances out of his thinking, it was Lincoln.
Mrs. Eddy’s words -- “this more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's mind, must have a benign and elevating influence upon the character of nations” -- could be a description of how Lincoln taught a new definition of America’s purpose to those who had to fight and redeem meaning from the ordeal of the Civil War. They also echo the opening words of the U.S. Constitution: “We, the people…in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice …and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution…”
The founders didn’t only write the Constitution, they ordained it, as if the document were to be a kind of civic ministry. Clearly they regarded the advent of America’s freedom not only as a political deed but as a providential sign, implying a higher calling than merely building a prosperous nation – an idea later reflected in Lincoln’s speeches as president. According to Lincoln’s law partner, “No man had a stronger or firmer faith in Providence.” Lincoln himself said that he believed in a “Creator” who possessed all wisdom and who had “established a principle, in obedience to which, worlds move and are upheld.”
This idea of God was more celestial than evangelical, explaining perhaps why Lincoln usually avoided discussing religion – he would never have satisfied someone who worshiped a punishing Jehovah or a body hanging on a cross. But as a boy, Lincoln for a long time had only two things to read: the works of Shakespeare, and the Bible, which he knew as well or better than his contemporaries. He wrote with the inflections of its language and knew all of its best stories. And that made him far better able to speak to the people’s mind than if he kept reminding audiences of how religious he was, which many of today’s politicians can’t stop doing.
In December 1864, two wives of Confederate prisoners of war went to the White House to ask Lincoln to release their husbands. One of the ladies emphasized that her husband was a religious man. “Tell him, when you meet him,” Lincoln replied, “that the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven.”
The classicist Edith Hamilton would have instantly recognized in that remark the passion of the prophet Ezekiel. In her book, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament, she tells us that Ezekiel saw that “the consciousness of being set above others, because one has blue blood or a white skin or the correct method of preparing food or the unique knowledge of the truth, is the great disrupting force.” When brandishing religion takes the place of humbly seeking truth, our ideals will not so easily elevate our characters.
“The Hebrew prophets,” Hamilton said, “were men possessed by the idea that what ought to be can and must be brought to pass. Their only aim was to establish on earth the rule of justice and mercy… Religion’s work was to create a world where no one was oppressed.” She could as easily have said this about Abraham Lincoln or any of the leaders of the great nonviolent movements of the 20th century which obtained their peoples’ rights.
The history of those movements demonstrates that oppression’s days are numbered once the people begin to resist; and when they disrupt its power to make people afraid, it collapses. But the knowledge of how to do this has not become intuitive, because the world still believes that material power, especially violence, is immovable. So the knowledge must be taught.
This is what Jesus did, incessantly. When Mary Magdalene and Joanna came to the tomb, found the great stone moved away, and realized Jesus had risen, one of the two men standing there in shining garments said to Mary, “Remember how he spoke to you when he was still in Galilee.” In other words: don’t be astonished; think about what this means.
Later when two of his followers are walking on the road to Emmaus, talking about the amazing news of resurrection, a stranger starts walking with them and “expounds” to them the reasons why it happened. After they finally recognize the stranger as Jesus, and he disappears, they run back to Jerusalem to tell their friends, and one says, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us, while he opened to us the scriptures?” And later, when Jesus stood in the midst of them in Jerusalem, the gospel simply says, “Then he opened their understanding.”
The only outward thing happening in these ecstatic encounters is speaking and listening. Why should it be otherwise, when the writer of John begins his gospel by saying, “In the beginning was the Word”? No one hyperventilated, sacrificed a goat, or excommunicated others who hadn’t joined the gathering. What happened was illumination, and then the rest of all their lives changed utterly. But there was more light to come, from this opening of understanding.
Between 1450 and 1605, three events occurred which made possible the ideas that fired the American founding. In 1450, Johannes Gutenburg invented movable type, making books available for a mass market. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenburg Castle church and began the Protestant Reformation, assailing a remote authoritarian Roman church. And in 1605, Sir Francis Bacon published The Advancement of Learning, which offered the first definition of the modern idea of science.
Without the Bible printed in vernacular languages, Luther would not so easily have reached an immense following. After the Reformation, Protestants based their ministry on the consent of believers, and believers were seen as equal before God – from which the ideas of self-government and universal rights naturally evolved.
The sociologist Adam Seligman tells us that this “new vision of the individual as a moral and autonomous agent” made possible the idea of a civil society in which reason rather than coercion was the basis of public thought. This in turn made possible the idea of the scientist, who gives himself authority to propound new theories based on his investigation of fact.
With reason, Francis Bacon argued, human inquiry would open nature’s secrets and free the world from dogmatism and what he called “animal time.” It was necessary to “stand upon the hill of Truth,” he said, above the “errors and wanderings and mists” of customary thought, before “another universe or theatre of things comes into view.”
That “new theatre”, to the followers of Gandhi in India, of Solidarity in Poland, of the people power revolution in the Philippines, of Vaclev Havel’s Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and of Yushchenko’s Orange Revolution in Ukraine – among other great movements of liberation -- was a political order which enforced equal rights for all, and in which power rested on the consent of the people, ascertained in free and fair elections.
Vaclev Havel said that such revolutions always begin with individuals who choose to stop believing the lie that life is normal when people’s rights are denied, and instead to begin to “live in the truth.” That would mean nothing unless thought was translated into action – unless the truth was demonstrated. Through skillful resistance to external control by fear and dogmatism, a people whose mind had grasped the truth about the real source of power could begin the work of liberating themselves. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I don’t have to tell you who said that.
Sir Francis Bacon, said the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “had one burning passion: to change the world through thought.” So did Ezekiel, Emerson, and Lincoln – and many other thinkers and emancipators to whom we owe the advent of a free and self-renovating global society. Notice that I say “advent” – meaning, this liberated world society is coming, but it’s not here yet. And there are threats to its birth that remain to be vanquished.
One of those threats is the idea that a new order can be brought about by bringing death to people who object to the terms of that order. That’s what terrorism is really about. The writer Jonathan Schell said that Jesus’s observation, “They that live by the sword shall die by the sword,” does more “than prescribe conduct; it makes a claim about the nature of the human world. We cannot suppose Jesus means that everyone who kills will be killed. But we can suppose he means that violence harms the doer as well as his victims; that violence generates counter-violence; and that the choice of violence starts a chain of events likely to bring general ruin.”
The novelist and political writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1940 about the violence of Stalinism. He had been a communist who renounced his political faith after witnessing the ruin it had created. The book was called Darkness at Noon. If we believe, in any extremity, that we are limited to material power to protect us or make us free, then we are living in what Francis Bacon called “animal time.” In a house that you enter at night, darkness flees when you turn on the light. But you must turn it on.
That is what the writer of the New Testament book of First John had in mind when he wrote to his followers in the first century. He had been a follower of Jesus and an eyewitness to his healings and other so-called miracles. And here is what John said:
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life: For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness… This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
References:
- Mary Baker Eddy, The People’s Idea of God, Christian Science Publishing Society, 1908.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Essential Transcendentalists, ed.by Richard G. Geldard, New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005
- Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Grand Rapids
- “Reply to a Southern Woman,” Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1959-1865, New York , The Library of America
- Edith Hamilton, Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1962.
- Loren Eiseley, The Man Who Saw Through Time, New York
- Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World, New York, Henry Holt and Company
- The First Epistle of John, Chapter 1, verses 1-2, 5.
.jpg){kind=small}
No comments:
Post a Comment