Secularized Religion in Nazi Ideology

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

The full essay is at "Political Religion."

Witchcraft as a Religion

If ever there were a mistaken title for a movie, Bell, Book and Candle must rank in the upper tier, for the spells in the bewitching comedy hinge on a cat and a bowl rather than bell, book, and candle. Magic can be thought of as the making use of concrete objects, combined with words, to engage a supernatural sort of causation meant to manipulate sentient or insentient beings/objects for one’s own purposes.  The film, Bell, Book and Candle (1958), is not only a love story and a comedy, but also the presentation of a story-world in which witches and warlocks engage in contending spells for selfish reasons. That story-world in turn can be viewed as presenting a religion, which can be compared and contrasted with others. Most crucially as far as religion is concerned, the supernatural element that is observable in the story-world points to the existence of a realm that lies beyond the world of our daily lives and thus renders the film’s story-world different. Put another way, the unique type of causation, which appears only as coincidence to the characters who are not in on the existences of witches and warlocks in the story-world, transcends appearance because the “laws” of the causation operate hidden from view, as if in another realm. I contend that it is precisely such transcendence not only in terms of belief, but also praxis, that distinguishes the domain of religion as unique and thus distinct from other domains, including those of science (e.g., biology, astronomy), history, and even ethics.

The full essay is at "Bell, Book, and Candle." 

Is the Hindu Bhagavadgita Monotheist?

Even though the Bhagavadgita is just a small part of the Mahabharata Hindu epic, the popularity of the former book in Hindu households has led to it being referred to as the Hindu Bible. This likeness should be taken at face value, for the contents in the Gita are very different than the theological context of the Bible, whether just the Torah, the Talmud, or the New Testament. Even though the virtue of kindness or love issuing out in compassion to other people is a shared descriptor of the Hindu Lord Krishna, which is the highest god in the Gita, and the Christian Lord Jesus, the ideational dissimilarities between the Gita and the Bible should not be glossed over. Put another way, not even the symbol of the mandala, which Joseph Campbell includes as the religious archetype of wholeness in The Power of Myth, should dispel the notion that religions contain unique and thus different philosophical and theological ideas and even just stances.

In the Bhagavadgita, for example, “(y)oga practices and knowledge of salvation are equated with ritual performances in which all defilements and desires are offered up in the ‘sacrificial fire’ (agni) of knowledge.”[1] In ritual, basic elements on Earth, such as fire, water, and food, which, astonishingly, are labeled as deities in the Chandogya Upanishad, are related to, and perhaps even vicariously connect, the cosmos and the human person. Knowledge of liberation from rebirths (samsara) involves or even necessitates the sacrifice of desires. The word salvation is extremely salient in Christianity, and yet is hardly innate to Hinduism; the connotation that being saved by the vicarious sacrifice (as per Anselm’s theology) of a god-man once and for all so that any believer is made right thereby with God (i.e., justified by faith, as per Luther’s theology) is foreign to Hinduism. To be sure, the inclusion the element of food in both the Hindu sacrificial ritual and in the Christian Eucharistic ritual (i.e., Communion) and even that the food is consecrated in the latter with the real presence of the divine (agape) and food is labeled at a deity in a Upanishad should not blind a non-Hindu reader of the Gita into supposing that the book’s paradigm like the one upon which the Judeo-Christian Bible rests.

Even taking into account Gnostic Christianity, the emphasis which the Gita places on knowledge, especially that which Krishna imparts to Arjuna, distinguishes Hinduism from Christianity, where at least Paul distinguishes theology from philosophy—only the knowledge of the wise being vain.[2] This demarcation, and prejudice against philosophy, does not exist in Hinduism. Malinar, for instance, refers explicitly to “the various religious and philosophical doctrines presented in the [Gita]” without driving an artificial wedge between them.[3]

Furthermore, even though Krishna is portrayed as the high deity and even the portal through which Brahman itself can be glimpsed in full—as if that were possible for a human being—it is a mistake to label the Gita as monotheist. Even though Krishna is portrayed in the Gita as “the mighty ruler and creator of the world and its dharmic order, as well as the ever-liberated and transcendent ‘highest self’” and thus as “the most powerful Lord and yogin,” with “power over nature (prakrti)” and being “the cosmic cause of activity” yet “detached from the created world, being forever ‘unborn’ and transcendent,”[4] it is a mistake to conclude that Krishna’s supreme qualities renders the Gita as monotheist.

As if the Gita were akin to Hobbes’ Leviathan, Malinar states that the “monotheistic theology in [the Gita] also offers an interpretation of kingship and royal power” simply because Krishna is revealed “as the highest god.”[5] Even in the Hebrew Bible where other gods are referred to, they are not credited with being real gods, so it is not as though Yahweh is the highest god; rather, Yahweh is the only god, and thus God.[6] Also, the accolades that Malinar attributes to Krishna do not make Krishna merely a manifestation of Yahweh, for the latter did not create a dharmic order and is not liberated as the highest-self. Although “detached from the created world, being forever ‘unborn’ and transcendent” also characterizes Yahweh, or God, I wonder whether Malinar was knowingly or unknowingly drawing on Christian theology in describing Krishna in such “Western” terms.

Furthermore, I submit that not even Brahman considered as the highest or supreme god in Hinduism renders the religion monotheist. One twentieth-century American philosopher, Keith Yandel, erroneously interpreted the Hindu philosopher and theologian, Shankara (8^th century, CE), as characterizing Hinduism as monotheist simply because, according to non-dualism, the Hindu deities are merely appearances, or manifestations, of Brahman. As the ground-being of the world’s multiplicity, Brahman cannot be said have what we think of as intelligence as it differs from the awareness or consciousness of being itself qua being.  Neither can Brahman be thought of as a discrete entity, for Brahman is the being of everything—of all existence, or, perhaps more accurately, of existence itself. It is surely difficult, if not impossible, to view raw being as an entity; rather, being is the existential basis (rather than an attribute) of entities. So, I’m not convinced that Brahman can even be said to be a deity. It is possible that English translators of the Gita (and the Upanishads) have used a familiar word whose meaning differs from what the writers of the text(s) had in mind. In any case, when the warrior Arjuna gets a glimpse of Brahman itself by Krishna revealing himself as he really is, it is not the Abrahamic deity, or God, that Arjuna sees in his epiphany.

As yet another example of a leitmotif of the Gita that is not easily convertible into any of the Abrahamic faiths, Krishna urges Arjuna to engage on the external battlefield with “detached action” as a way to avoid “karmic bondage” even as Arjuna is active and performs his social duties.[7] To be sure, to be detached from sinful desires in Christianity bears a rough similarity to the “detached action,” but here even the desire not to harm relatives is a problem. Also, the very notion of “karmic bondage” is utterly foreign to the Abrahamic religions. In Christianity, for example, the bondage is to sin, whose basis lies within rather than as actions (even less in the residue of past actions).

Although religions can be said to bear Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances” to each other, the urge to minimize or overlook the differences between religions, as in depicting one in terms of another (or that another uses), should be checked and corrected for, lest scholars of religion unintentionally remake particular religions into more familiar terms. One of the main benefits of studying more than one religion, especially religions other than one’s own, is the access to different ideas and theologies/philosophies. A person’s own religious/philosophical paradigm can be made transparent to oneself even to be seen as an alternative rather than as the unquestioned and unrecognized default. Unconsciously distorting other religions into more familiar terms diminishes this realization.

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1. Angelika Malinar, The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 4.
2. 1. Cor. In contrast, the Hebrew Bible contains the verse, “God knows the thoughts of men.” Paul adapts this to: “God knows the thoughts of the wise; they are vain.” Jerusalem is fine; Athens is not. Such a dichotomy does not exist in Hinduism.  
3. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 5.
4. Ibid., p. 6.
5. Ibid., p. 4.
6. Also, whereas Hobbes’ notion of a sovereign power, whether a king or an assembly, has absolute political and religious (i.e., interpreting divine law) power within a territory, Hindu kings have traditionally been at least ritually dependent on the Brahmin priests in the main temple not only for another year of legitimacy, but also as a means of gaining power by giving land away through the auspices of the temple.
7. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 4.

Living Ritual

I contend that for a religious ritual to be “alive” is for it to be responsive to spiritual truths as they are played out by or among the people who have gathered even just as spectators rather than participants. In liturgy, the readings and the ritual itself can stimulate a spiritual state of mind (un état de l’esprit—this last word alone signifying the connection), which in turn can even unconsciously prompt conduct that can be observed to be religious (or spiritual) in nature. For a ritual to be alive is for it to incorporate such conduct in order to draw attention to the underlying religious truth manifesting in one or more persons. The antagonist in this drama is the strict literalist who goes inflexibly by the letter of the ritual’s laws rather than the spirit thereof, ignoring that only the spirit rises and thus is capable of lifting humans in general and in a liturgical context in particular.

The full essay is at "Living Ritual."

Comparing Religions

The subfield of comparative religions can be exciting because the beliefs, values, symbols, myths, and rituals can introduce a person to such different ideas that the rush of making a discovery can even be felt. Jaroslav Pelikan, a twentieth-century historian of Christianity, once said that he had learned so many languages just so he could have access to ideas that were not as of yet available in English. Such ideas could be very different than the historian’s extant knowledge. It is perhaps like the early European explorers in America finding plants and cultures that were so unlike those of Europe because the distance had not allowed for cross-pollination and the influence of cultural exchanges. I contend that one reason why religions can be very difficult to compare is that elements of them in a given topic can be so different in kind as to not be comparable. Religions may even be based on variables that cannot be directly compared because they are so different in kind. The related paradigms also may not be comparable. Therefore, it may be that religious comparison is more fitting to comparing sects (e.g., denominations) within a given religion. Even when continuity exists between an established religion and a new one in the same context, the foundational variables may be so different in kind that they are not comparable. I will look at cosmology (e.g., Creation), ritual (e.g., sacrifices) and divine attributes (e.g., truth and love) below to support my claim.

The paradigm of a creator and creation must seem very foreign to a Buddhist who has been brought up without the notion of a beginning point. Indeed, the Big Bang could be reckoned as one explosion in a series. The underlying cyclical idea differs appreciably from that of linearity. That Creation occurred only once at the beginning and salvation history does not repeat itself assumes that time is linear—a straight line that keeps on going without doubling back. I contend that religions are so difficult to compare because they rest on qualitatively different variables and even paradigms (i.e., basic frameworks).

Shankara’s Hindu metaphysic of truth surrounded by illusion surrounded by ignorance (maya) is so different from the Abrahamic religious notion of a creator and creation that the two paradigms can hardly be compared in that finding a common denominator is necessary. That the Abrahamic deity created all that is may be true, but truth itself is not the same as creation ex nihilo. Truth cannot depend even on the created existence if the Abrahamic deity is the first cause and stands outside of creation as well as being omnipresent within it. Furthermore, truth can be regarded as a divine attribute, whereas creation is a divine function. Truth is what God is, whereas creating the world is something God did (as time is linear in the Abrahamic religions). Conflating the nature of an entity and what it does overlooks the basic difference between the two, and thus can give rise to false comparisons based on an assumed common denominator.

In my first world religions course in college, I was fascinated that I could hold both of the disparate (i.e., essentially different in kind; not allowing of comparison) paradigms of Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions in my head without being able to find a basis on which I could compare the two paradigms; they were so unlike. Put another way, I was intrigued that two paradigms do not allow for comparison and yet seek to explain the same phenomenon (i.e., religious metaphysics). The sheer paradigmatic difference alone amazed me so much that I was convinced that further study in the field would give me ideas and paradigms fascinatingly different from what I already knew (e.g., from my religious upbringing).  In studying ancient Greco-Roman religion and Christianity, I discovered that even though continuities can be found, that the two religions are based on qualitatively different religious variables renders comparison difficult if not impossible outside of the few shared continuities.

Ancient Greco-Roman religion was not just “Greek mythology.” In fact, ritual played the central role as means of appeasing and petitioning one god or another. The ritual sacrificing of animals took place on alters outside of the temples, which were used to store gifts for the gods. Because the Roman emperors considered themselves, or were considered to be divine, they mandated that sacrifices be made. Some early Christians accepted even death rather than sacrifice to a god other than Yahweh.

Christianity carried on the ritual of sacrifice in the Eucharistic liturgy. The bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ when a priest holds them up in the air above an alter (later, table) and recalls the sacrifice that Jesus makes in the Gospels. The Greek and Roman priests consumed the best of the burnt offerings, and the Christian priests consume the body and blood of Christ. Until the Vatican II council of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s, the chalices were not extended to the laity. There was thus a continuity between the respective Roman priests.

Lest it be assumed that the two religions are easily comparable, it should be noted that even the importance of Jesus Christ’s vicarious sacrifice (see Anselm) does not mean that Christianity’s most important variable is ritualistic sacrifice. Even more important than the ritual consecration is the variable of love. The relative importance of love over ritualistic sacrifice is particularly evident in Protestantism. Even in Anglicanism and Lutheranism, taking Communion receives less emphasis than in Roman Catholicism. That ritual sacrifice is not the core of Christianity does not downgrade the religious efficacy of the Eucharist in the transforming process of sanctification. Rather, the ritualistic sacrifice is a means to an end that reflects another variable (love). The variables of love and ritual are not only distinct; they are different in kind.

To Augustine, “God is love” is foundational. Calvin agreed. The theologians could have been looking at the following biblical verse, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”[1] Even to say God loves is awkward because God’s very nature is love. Hence no one says, love loves, for what else would love do? This is not to say that the action of loving is synonymous with love itself. By example and preachments, Jesus of the Gospels makes the foundation clear. This is not to say that Jesus’ vicarious sacrifice for the salvation of humans therefore lies at the core of the religion. Just following the biblical passage above ending with “God is love” is this sentence: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”[2] “In this,” namely that God is love, God became incarnate and willingly allowed that incarnation to be sacrificed for humans. The incarnation, including its sacrifice, presupposes that God is love, so ritually reenacting the sacrifice of the incarnation cannot be foundational over God’s nature as love. Put another way that should now seem familiar, God’s nature exists before, and is thus not contingent on, God sending his Son into the world. Whereas sacrifice can be classified under ritual (as one type), love cannot be so classified as it is not a type of ritual; indeed, love as the deity’s nature and ritual as a human activity are not directly comparable.

Therefore, just because phenomena exist in the same domain does not mean that the underlying core variables that are not shared are directly comparable. To be sure, two religions may be based on the same core-variable, in which case comparison is not nearly as much of a problem, but where the bases are disparate, comparisons can only go so far. For example, we can compare the ritual sacrifices in ancient Roman religion and Roman Catholicism, but once we go deeper, we run into a brick wall because ritual and love are not directly comparable as they are disparate.  Even if two variables can be connected, they may still be disparate. For example, truth and Creation are not directly comparable even though it can be said that it is true that the Abrahamic deity created all that is in Creation. The nature of truth in Hinduism does not recognize this connection. This alone means that truth itself must transcend its particular manifestations. Hence St. Denis (Pseudo-Dionysus) wrote that God transcends the Trinity, so a person clutching to the latter metaphysical idea does not sufficiently transcend beyond the limits of  human cognition in yearning for God. It follows that the nature of God transcends human conceptions of the incarnation, which includes Jesus’ sacrifice and the related ritualistic sacrifices. Only by getting to the core variable of a religion can it be understood as sui generis, or unique, even though other religions are within the same domain.

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[1] 1 John 4:8. English Standard Version.

[2] 1 John 4:9.

Undermining Progress: Power as Ignorance that Cannot Be Wrong

Bleeding to heal. The Earth is flat. Earth is at the center of the solar system. Zeus lives on Mount Olympus. The divine right of kings to act even as tyrants (e.g., Henry VIII of England). Hitler died in his bunker. Turning the heater on in a local bus kills coronavirus. These are things that were thought in their respective times to be uncontrovertibly true. In some of these cases, the power of the establishment was not subtle in enforcing them even when they should have been questioned. How presumptuous this finite, mortal species is! If ignorance on stilts is bliss, then why is it such in need of power? Subconsciously, the human mind must realize that its assumption of not being able to be wrong is flawed. We are subjective beings with instinctual urges—one of which manifests in the unquestioned assumption that what we know cannot be wrong, and furthermore that we are entitled to impose our “facts” on others. As the homo sapiens (i.e., wise) species, we are too sure, and too proud, concerning our knowledge and especially beliefs. We would like to have the certainty and objectivity that computers have, but we are subjective biological animals, not inert machines. 

The full essay is at "Undermining Progress."

Pope Francis Excommunicates the Italian Mafia: How Tight is Christianity?

As though a lamb going into a lion’s den, Pope Francis journeyed to Sibari in southern Italy on the Summer Solstice of 2014 to castigate the Italian mafia, and more specifically the Ndrangheta crime group, as an example of “the adoration of evil.”  He added that “(t)hose who in their lives follow this path of evil, as mafiosi do, are not in communion with God. They are excommunicated.”[1] Presumably so too are the mafia families in other European states, and in the American states as well. As laudable as such excommunicating is, the fact that such murderous thugs have regarded themselves as Catholics, and, more generally as Christian, points to a more profound need for reform within the religion itself. In this essay, I draw on The Godfather saga to present this argument.

From: “Pope Francis Excommunicates the Mafia: Lessons from ‘The Godfather’”

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[1] Reuters, “Pope Excommunicates Mafiosi,” The Huffington Post, June 21, 2014.

A Ukrainian Priest’s Divisive Politics: At What Religious Cost?

In Lviv, Ukraine, Rev. Addriy, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church rather than the Ukrainian affiliate of the Russian Orthodox Church, said after a Mass in June 2014 that the European Union is an “empire of evil” defying the Word of God and spreading sins including homosexuality and pedophilia. The priest went on to characterize the Ukrainians who toppled President Viktor Yanukovych as “Godless deviants” and “fools . . . in the pay of hostile foreign powers.”[1] Being in the western part of the state, the eastern-looking priest was not exactly “preaching to the choir”—meaning he must have known that his message would not be well-received by his congregation. This disjunction illustrates a distinctly religious problem that can arise when clerics fly too far afield from the religious domain onto those of politics, economics, or even social problems.

The problem is multi-level. On the surface, attention to non-religious matters carries with it the opportunity cost of foregone attention to religion. To be sure, the priest spoke outside of Mass, and thus he did not detract from it directly. However, at a deeper level, he did diminish the religious value of his Masses. His own diminished stature or credibility in the political matter at hand put his religious role at risk as well.

Anger at an opposing political view inexorably puts distance in a religious relationship. The latter is not limited to new-found suspicion regarding sermons or homilies. The transcendent religious experience—communion with God in Christian terms—involves shifting attention from the external environment (i.e., what is going on around you) to an “inward” orientation to a reference point that inherently transcends the limits of cognition and perception. Feeling “safe” enough to risk shifting attention off what is going on in the worship context (e.g., the church) is essential to being wholly invested in the experience itself of yearning for that which is yearned for beyond the particular mask of eternity. Feeling that the person in the room who is in charge is in any sense a threat, or even just disliking him or her, thus detracts from the religious experience, and thus from the religion itself as an instrument thereof.

So, beyond the point that political ideology is of another domain than religion, the over-reaching can inadvertently sabotage or at least diminish the intensity of the religious experience possible in a given worship context. In other words, a dedicated context, sui generis to religious experience, is compromised as soon as stuff from other domains is brought in. The inherent sensitivity of religious experience, owing both to the intimacy in yearning for “the wholly other” that lies inherently beyond our reach and the giving up of attention to one’s immediate surroundings (i.e., what is going on in the church), is violated by the breaking in of stuff from our realm (e.g., politics, and even church business!).

In the case of Roman Catholicism, for example, the “presence” of the sacrificed or consecrated Christ in the Tabernacle on the altar sets a sanctuary apart as sacred space from the rest of the world. Whether or not such a presence is actually in the bread in the enclosure is not the point; rather, that Catholics treat the sanctuary as perpetually dedicated to religious activity facilitates their entering into religious experience as in communing with God after ingesting Christ in the Eucharist. A priest or lectern making announcements from the weekly bulletin, for example, as the congregants are intensely focused in transcendent yearning disturbs the sensitivity of the experience itself.

Interestingly, the “pure” or rarified sensitivity that is in religious experience intentionally devoid of stimuli that can dilute the sensitivity itself can carry over onto ensuing experience back in a person’s daily world of quotidian stimuli. That is the religious experience is in one sense a “sharpener” of a person’s sensitivity, which on return to the world can “carry over.” Although the heightened sensitivity to the ordinary doubtlessly fades as a person’s ordinary sensitivity level kicks back in amid its customary context, regular “religious exercise” may give its more finely-tuned sensitivity greater staying power, such that the “sensitivity weight-lifting” sessions may eventually not be necessary for this purpose.

Applied interpersonally in a person’s daily life, the greater, “microscopic” sensitivity gained through religious experience is commonly known as compassion. In fact, this byproduct is typically misclassified as religious rather than ethical in nature, and this error in turn can invite or provide an opening for interlarding content from the world such as social issues (e.g. abortion, poverty, social justice) into the worship context. In the case of Unitarian Universalism, especially when its humanist movement reached its zenith in the 1970s in the United States, social structures based on the ideology of egalitarianism are regarded as sacred. Such self-ideology as sacred can be interpreted in religious terms as a manifestation of self-idolatry, which snuffs out or blocks outright transcendent spiritual or religious experience.

Therefore, sensitivity not only pertains to transcendent religious experience devoid of interfering external stimuli, but is a byproduct known as compassion that is of value in the world. Though not religious itself, the ethical principle of what Adam Smith calls “fellow-feeling” in his Theory of Moral Sentiments can itself thwart the sort of invective inflicted by the Ukrainian priest on his disheartened flock. “Do not cause your brother to stumble,” Paul advises in one of his letters to a congregation just a few decades after his Lord’s crucifixion.  If a cleric is not sufficiently careful in this regard, we can assume that he or she has little regard for the value of others’ religious experience, and even such experience itself, relative to more “worldly” agendas.

It is ironic, to say the least, to find religious functionaries and even institutions oblivious to what is conducive to a religious experience that is transcendent in nature. Both in being of value in itself and for one of its byproducts, intense dedicated yearning for that which inherently lies beyond the limits of human perception and cognition may actually receive scant attention in most religious services. Even where the rites are conducive to such experience, clerics may tend to treat the ritual as an end in itself rather than as preparatory. In how many Masses, for example, is the experience of communing with God after the Eucharistic ritual treated as the high point, or core, of the Mass? 

In this photo, furnished by the U.S. Defense Department, a bishop consecrates the bread into the body of Christ. Is this moment of the sacrifice of Christ in the Mass its high point even if so in terms of the Eucharistic rite? Behind the priest is the tabernacle, in which previously consecrated pieces are stored. They make the room into "sacred space" continuously rather than merely during a Mass. 

Instead, the priest-centric consecration of the bread and wine is said to by the pinnacle, and the Mass itself is typically quickly ended as soon as the priest finishes washing the dishes. Unlike any experience oriented to the external stimuli of a priest holding up the consecrated species, which admittedly can be quite meaningful to a Catholic, the communing experience following the ritual transcends even the worshipper’s immediate environment and thus is more conducive to isolating the eternal (by transcending the external) and then sensing that of the eternal back in the person’s daily life, including in other people. This sensitivity is more finely tuned to them, and thus to the subtle indications of their suffering; and I suppose the experience of yearning transfers over in a way in the motivation to relieve the suffering. However, the heightened sensitivity itself may also furnish the motivation. 

In terms of liturgy generally, religious ritual can be thought of as preparation, rather than as the whole of a religious service—distinctly religious experience being the immediate objective; as the referent is both by definition and experientially inherently “beyond,” the intensity can be put on the yearning itself, especially if the religionist is willing in true humility to transcend even the given mask of eternity to the raw numinous experience itself. Put another way, the yearning itself, or communing, can extend beyond the human reception of divine revelation into our familiar categories of thoughts and images. To the detriment of such "pure" religious experience wherein the immanence of transcendence demands a heightened sensitivity, the divisive Ukrainian priest had other treasures in mind, and therein in all probability his heart and god could also be found.

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[1] Andrew Higgins, “Ukrainian Church Faces Obscure Pro-Russia Revolt in its Own Ranks,” The New York Times, June 21, 2014.

The Eucharist as Transcendent Experience

Taking a swipe at a core tenet of Catholicism, Bill Keller of the New York Times writes, “Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.” I contend that the editor’s characterization of consecration represents a misunderstanding of the Eucharist. Such misunderstandings have been worse; in the early years of the Church, some pagans were under the impression that the Christians were meeting on Sundays to eat babies. Indeed, phrases such as “eat my body” may in fact be inherently prone to being misunderstood.

Generally speaking, religion may have a tendency to flirt with the literal, or empirical, even at the expense of that which is distinctly religious in nature. Hence Keller’s point that every institutional religion has baggage may be correct even if his interpretation of the Eucharist is erroneous. It should be of no surprise that religion is hardly immune to the vaunted pretentions of the human mind even to that which is beyond the limits of its cognition and perception. Under the circumstances, we would be well-advised to be relatively circumspect in how firmly we impose our religious beliefs as if they were established knowledge.

Regarding the Eucharist, Keller’s use of “actual flesh” is misleading, for both actual and flesh point to an empirical basis or connotation. When we moderns typically say actual, we mean that something actually exists, which is to say that it is the case empirically in the world in which we live (i.e., based in the human domain). Keller’s use of flesh confirms his usage of actual, for flesh is indeed found descriptively in the world, as in, The wolf ate the lamb’s flesh. In German, the word for meat is Fleisch. To be blunt, a priest does not turn a wafer into meat. I’m not sure whether changing something from one food group to another would constitute a miracle anyway. This allusion to food groups is apt, for my approach stresses the utility of delimiting categories. I assume that the various realms, such empirical, metaphysical, and theological, are qualitatively different and distinct.

I contend that the Eucharist involves the application of a theological concept through social contract as pertaining to an empirical object. This is not to say that the empirical realm is that of theology.  Van Rad makes this point in his text, History of Israel. A faith narrative, such as the covenantal relationship between Jehovah and the Hebrews is not comprised of bare historical facts, even if Biblical allusions to history are used for theological purposes and given a theological meaning. The meaning gleaned from the faith narrative does not establish or confirm historical facts. Nor are theological meanings scientific concepts; the two domains are distinct, and thus have their own respective criteria. Whereas history and science are confined within the empirical domain, which is in principle within the limits of human cognition and perception, theological meaning is transcendent in nature, meaning that our ideas and sensual impressions fail inherently to go the distance with respect to religion.

Neither is theology essentially metaphysics, for otherwise, religion would be none other than philosophy. Put another way, meaning is not reality itself. People who characterize the Trinity as real are making a metaphysical rather than a religious claim. The latter has to do with the unfathomable mystery behind the notion of a triune god, rather than any metaphysical claim that the three persons exist in reality itself. Put another way, if God is the condition or source of existence, then God cannot be existence itself—much less some empirical object existing. Neither does God as conceived theologically reduce to Kant’s “things in themselves.” God is not “the Real.” Yet neither is the transcendent limited to Kant’s phenomenal realm of appearances. Religious meaning is of its own, distinct, realm—yet how elusive it must truly be, for all the rush to cover it over with leaves from other fields. If I am indeed on to something here, we would hardly recognize the distinctly religious terrain for all we have interlarded on top of it. Put another way, our theological gardens tend to end up looking a lot like ourselves.

In terms of the Eucharist, Catholics maintain that the body and blood of Christ are really present theologically under the empirical “species” of bread and wine. In Catholicism, the real presence is a theological concept called transubstantiation. That it is applied to empirical objects—bread and wine—does not mean that the religious meaning is empirical in nature. The religious term refers to another theological concept—that of resurrected body—rather than to the empirical concept of “actual flesh.”

In a nutshell, Bill Keller has Jesus’ earthly body rather than his resurrected body in mind. To think of a resurrected body on the basis of a physical body is to reduce theology to physiology or biology. The resurrected Jesus walking through a door and asking for something to eat anticipates the tendency to liken what we don’t understand to things that are familiar. Theological meaning is distinct, rather than reducing to any of the empirical sciences, yet for centuries Christians insisted on being buried so their physical bones would be available to be resurrected.

Augustine writes that the relation between the Father and the Son should not be thought of in terms of the relationship between dads and sons. By implication, the Son as a theological concept is qualitatively different—meaning not just in degree—from what we know of what it means to be a son from our observations of sons in our midst. Christians forget Jesus’s reminder, “no one knows the Son except the Father” (Mt 11:27). It is all too natural to reduce begotten to made by clothing the transcendent in familiar clothes.

Resurrected body does not apply empirically; rather, it is a theological meaning that is situated in a faith narrative rather than a historical account. This is the point that Keller so vitally misses in his essay. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not actual flesh. Nor is the real presence metaphysical in nature. The empirical species of bread and wine as like posts around which the Catholic believer can swing around, as it were, in the transition from the empirical realm of the everyday to a distinctly transcendental experience that transcends even the posts themselves. A major pitfall to watch out for is slighting the experience in favor of holding onto the posts. There is even a risk that some of the unsatisfied religious meaning gets transferred onto the empirical signs themselves, thus making them into idols without realizing it. The mistaken assumption is then that a sustained, intense focus on the empirical objects enhances rather than takes away from religious experience. In actuality, the religious domain, which is inherently transcendental, has been confiscated with more familiar experience within the limits of human cognition and perception. All the while, the Kingdom of God is within, as though smiling at these artificial edifices we create to edify and bemuse ourselves.

I contend that the bottom line on the real presence is the theologically-felt experience of transformation or sanctification that can be induced by applying the theological concept to the bread and wine via ritual. The religious experience is not exhausted by the symbols on the surface; religionists merely use them, and the associated ritual, as prep. Crassly put, they put people in the mood. Sustained, concentrated transcending as an experience that is really present (though not reality!) does not just happen after a person steps into a church from a busy day, hence the rites and posts to follow along the way. The point is the experience, felt as really present (and thus eternal rather than of time and space)—the artifices along the way are just so, rather than religious objects to be held as though they were ends in themselves, which is to say, idols.

Source:

Bill Keller, “Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith,” New York Times, August 25, 2011.