Constantine's Sword

Wow, what a book! I didn’t fully appreciate how pernicious is the only-through-Jesus stance, although it’s the title of one of my chapters and implied in the subtitle of God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky, until I read Contantine’s Sword. To everyone who is at all interested in my writings I enthusiastically recommend this book by James Carroll. While reading it, I expected to pass on its revelations of the Catholic Church’s war against Jews. But it gets closer to my themes than that.

James Carroll brings us the entire history of Catholics degrading Jews by articulating a theology of the cross that blamed Jews for killing God. The Church herded Jews into ghettoes, stole their children to baptize them, ruthlessly restricted Jewish mobility and commerce, nearly forced them to become moneylenders and then despised them for usury. Carroll shows us canonized saints and revered scholars spewing anti-Semitic venom, with the ever-present undercurrent of conversion to Jesus as the only option for any life. In the words of Thomas Aquinas, Jesus “is the absolutely necessary way of salvation.” [391]

Carroll quotes Rosemary Radford Ruether, who asserts that the religion-based hatred of Jews led to the race-based hatred of blood purity regulations, “the ancestor of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.” [382]
I was especially interested in the facts finally settling the controversy over whether Pius XII, the pope during my youth, was guilty of cooperating with Hitler. After this book, there can be no doubt.

It started when Eugenio Pacelli, a cardinal and secretary of state for Pius XI, worked out a Reichskonkordat with Hitler in 1933 to advance the political standing of the papacy. This endorsement by the Catholic Church saved Hitler’s reputation from the suspicious eyes of other countries. He had not been shy about expressing his hostility to Jews. When his campaign against them became more apparent months later, Pacelli pleaded for non-Aryans who converted to the Christian religion, indicating no concern for non-converted Jews.

The most damning incident happened in the Jewish quarter next to the Vatican and Pope Pius XII, the former Eugenio Pacelli.

The Germans had occupied Rome in September 1943. Until then, Jews had been relatively safe, but at 5:30 A.M. on October 16, the noise of gunfire broke the night silence of the ghetto. By then it was home to about four thousand Jews. The streets leading out of the quarter were blocked. SS officers drove residents from their homes, and in a few hours the Germans had arrested more than twelve hundred people. The Jews were taken to a temporary jail in the Italian Military College, which stood a few hundred yards from Vatican City. Yet from the Vatican, no voice was raised in public support of the Jews.
Two days later, the prisoners were put on trucks, taken to the railroad station, and loaded into boxcars. Again, no voice was raised in protest. The arrested Jews were gone. Five days later, this entry appears in the meticulously kept log at Auschwitz: “Transport, Jews from Rome. After the selection 149 men registered with numbers 158451-158639 and 47 women registered with numbers 66172-66218 have been admitted to the detention camp. The rest have been gassed. [524]

Defenders of Pius XII insist the Holy See intervened with a “dressing down” of the German ambassador the morning after October 16 and stopped deportations, but notes by the Vatican’s own secretary of state reveal anxious hope that the Vatican would not have to publicly condemn the roundup of Jews and bring Nazi hostility onto itself.

The [German] Ambassador after several moments of reflection, asked me: What will the Holy See do if events continue?
I replied: the Holy See would not want to be put into the necessity of uttering a word of disapproval.

The Vatican secretary of state explicitly authorized that this communication be kept private, obviously avoiding any public plea for justice. The German Ambassador wrote Berlin that the pope, “although harassed from various quarter, has not allowed himself to be stampeded into making any demonstrative pronouncement against removal of the Jews from Rome.” [527] Many Jews did find refuge in Catholic homes, religious houses, churches, and the Vatican itself. What Pius XII had to do with the acts of heroism is not known.

I hinted that Constantine’s Sword states themes similar to mine, but I can’t say it mimics my brief, blunt statement, “I don’t believe Jesus is God or that his death saved the world.” Carroll is blunt but never brief. He quotes “the great twentieth-century Catholic theologian” Karl Rahner and informs me of something I hadn’t known. Rahner was silenced by the Vatican under Pius XII for stating that Catholic dogma needs to be reconsidered but, under Pope John XXIII, he was rehabilitated by Vatican II. No theologian had more influence at that council. Rahner wrote:

The West is no longer shut up in itself. . . . it can no longer regard itself simply as the center of the history of this world and as the center of culture, with a religion which . . . could appear as the obvious and indeed sole way of honoring God . . . today everybody is the next-door neighbor and spiritual neighbor of everyone else in the world . . . which puts the absolute claim of our own Christian faith into question. [583]

Carroll added, “The Church’s fixation on the death of Jesus as the universal salvific act must end.” Expressed briefly and bluntly, Jesus’ death did not save the world.
We do not own the truth.

Spinoza

The name Spinoza kept coming up in my readings and I love philosophy, so when James Carroll devoted a chapter to him in Constantine’s Sword, I paid attention. I'm surprised by the similarity between his ideas and trends in spiritual thinking today.

Baruch or Benedict Spinoza was Jewish by birth but branded an atheist, anti-religionist, materialist, and pantheist. He was banned and banished, investigated by the Spanish Inquisition, and excommunicated by an Amsterdam synagogue. He endured abuse from the other side too, as his Jewishness was targeted by non-Jews, a common sport during his lifetime (1632-1677).

He was actually intensely aware of God, a saintly man of whom someone wrote, “one of the most exemplary human beings ever to have lived." He continues to influence discourse about spiritual matters.

Spinoza (1632-1677) synthesized science with the philosophies and corrected Cartesian dualism.
René Descartes (1596-1650) was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and to distinguish this from the physical brain, which produces the kind of intelligence that computers can replicate. His distinction highlighted the mind-body problem that still occupies us today, but it didn’t show how mind and body interact.

Descartes’ Spirit-Matter distinction had the good effect of separating church from state, but it also produced Deism, with its image of the mechanistic clockmaker God who has nothing to do with the world’s affairs. Spirit was relegated to the SUPER natural—separated from the world. The severe separation of God from physical creation, in Carroll’s words, divided “rational from emotional, individual from community, scientific from artistic, pragmatic from moral.”

To counter dualism, we can think of the All or the Absolute, what we call God, as transcending "ordinary, physical reality while at the same time being the most natural reality, not some supernatural, extra-natural, un-natural, external-to-reality being we have to be told to believe in.” I put this in quotes because it’s what I argued in my guest post for ddjango (an assumed name).

Now I find that Spinoza's philosophy predated my thought way back in the 17th century. He thought of God as the dynamic principle of order immanent within nature. He identified God with Nature, seeing them as two names for the same reality:

Nothing exists save the one substance—the self-contained, self-sustaining, and self-explanatory system which constitutes the world.

This reminds me of Andre Comte-Sponville’s words in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality:

Being? Nature? Becoming? . . . Everyone is free to choose their own vocabulary . . . This is what has traditionally been called the absolute or the unconditioned, that which depends on nothing but itself and exists independently of all relations, conditions and points of view.

The translation of this French atheist’s Little Book came out in 2007. He and Spinoza are two European philosophers separated in time but close in thought, and both echoing the theme of Eastern thought—all things exist in interdependence.

If God is in all, we don’t need religions to mediate God, do we? So Spinoza was considered anti-religion. But he didn’t oppose religions or disrespect them. He did advocate for seeing them, like everything else, sub specie aeternitatis or from the point of view of eternity. In other words, no particular human thought or religion is supreme; there’s always another way of looking at things. He advocated equality of religious sects, another idea ahead of its time.

Whenever I write something this philosophical, I’m afraid that some of my readers get glazed eyes and quit trying to penetrate the abstractions. Let me know if philosophy does that to you.

Facts that subvert

Few Christians today are aware of facts well known by scholars. They subvert the typical thinking of Christians today.
• Jesus of Nazareth had no intention of letting people worship himself or starting a new religion. He was a committed Jew, but the New Testament and centuries of teaching have hidden this fact. In my writings I attribute the founding of Christianity to Paul, but he didn’t intend starting a new religion either.

• In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ enemies are Satan (1:23-26), the Scribes (3:22-27), his own family (3:31), and the people of his native place (6:4-6). In Luke his enemies are “the chief priests, officers of the temple guard, and elders” (22:52)—already a shift toward marking Jews as bad people.

• “The loaded phrase ‘the Jews’ appears a total of 16 times in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, while in John it appears 71 times,” writes James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword. In John 8, Jesus debates the Jews who say, “Our father is Abraham.” Jesus tells them (8:44), “The father you spring from is the devil.” Scholars today don’t attribute to the historical Jesus these words that build antagonism toward Jews.

• The first followers of Jesus did not think of him as God but, by about 70 years after his death, the messenger was becoming the message in the natural progression of human discourse. Titles implying divinity were applied to Jesus as well as to God.

• Before the 4th century, there was wide divergence of Christian beliefs. Some emphasized Jesus’ humanity; others downplayed it to the extent of denying he was a normal human being. Palestinians, the people of Jesus’ family and native region, did not divinize him.

• Beliefs about Jesus expected of Christians now—that he is one of three persons who make up God—grew from a demand by a Roman Emperor, Constantine, that bishops get together and decide what Christians should believe. There followed a series of councils called by emperors along with fierce disagreements. Men called “Saint” today were among the most vicious contenders, and of course politics entered the discussion as well as beliefs about spiritual reality.

• As sun gods were popular in ancient religions, Yahweh and Jesus also became sun gods. The Israelites (ancestors of the Jews) worshipped Yahweh as a sun god, according to Catholic scholar Hugo Rahner. The Book of Malachi, which immediately precedes the New Testament, refers to “the sun of righteousness . . . with healing in its wings.” This, writes Rahner, “sounds much like the winged solar disc of Babylon and Egypt,” and the phrase “Sun of Righteousness” was often applied to Jesus by early church fathers. (Chapter 4 of Malachi appears in the RSV translation but does not appear in the NAB approved by Catholic bishops. I wonder why.)

• Jesus was widely perceived as a sun god, as evidenced by the worship day of Christians being called “Sunday”; the birthday of Jesus being assigned to the winter solstice, birth of the sun; and churches orienting their altars toward the East. A fourth century calendar entry for December 25 lists the birth of Christ along with the birth of the sun. (A later calendar adjustment accounts for the solstice now occurring earlier.)

These facts suggest that Christianity was created inadvertently, that religious beliefs shift and borrow from competing beliefs, and that New Testament writers contributed to the scapegoating of Jews by Christians.

Trinity by Ken Wilber

Many Christian philosophers, even non-Christians like the Buddhist Thich Nhât Hanh, have described the Trinity. In EnlighenNext (September/November 2009), a magazine for evolutionaries, I read an articulation of Trinity—although he doesn’t call it that—by the contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber that appeals to me. Here’s how Wilber with EnlightenNext editor Andrew Cohen describes three faces of God that easily harmonize with Christian language.

1st person—I.
“First-person Spirit is the great I AM, the pure radical subjectivity or witness in every sentient being.” If you have used Buddhist prompts to meditate, this dimension of Spirit may be familiar to you. As I interpret Wilber’s description, it’s found in the deepest part of our selves, the Higher Self, the Christ.

2nd person—You.
“Spirit in second person is the great Thou,” something immeasurably greater than we can possibly imagine, something before which surrender and devotion and submission and gratitude are the only appropriate responses. This is Transcendence, the Beyond, the great Other, what I’ve called the More. To this Majesty we bend the knee and surrender, utterly.

3rd person—It.
“And Spirit in third person is the great web of life, the Great Perfection of everything that is arising,” the cosmic process.

Wilber and Cohen give the greatest attention to the second dimension which directs our intimate relations with what we call God—our subjective spirituality. They warn that the latest generation of Westerners doesn’t get this one because the last half-century has trained them to seek “my pleasure, my happiness, my success” in self-centered narcissism. Surrender to Thou is mistaken for craven, “slavish, devotional, obsequious slobbering.” The circles I know—family, friends, acquaintances—don’t fit this category but I recognize it in the wider American culture, the consuming, throw-away, acquisitive society.

Wilber and Cohen advise us to embrace “hierarchy,” which can be misunderstood as condoning the tyrannical acts of domineering Catholic bishops, for example. The word has triggered some confusion, frustration and resistance in my circle, which is accustomed to rules from church hierarchs who claim that obedience to “the magisterium” is the same as obeying God. But gurus Wilber and Cohen obviously have in mind a different case than Catholics of my generation when they promote respect for hierarchy. They mean we should recognize higher levels of spiritual perfection and take direction from individuals who have evolved to a higher level.

Wilber explains,

Each higher level doesn’t oppress the previous level—it loves it; it embraces it. Molecules do not go around oppressing atoms! . . .

This hierarchical perspective is not a way to put you down . . . ; it’s a way for me to understand my own unfolding, . . . to help me grow, develop, evolve. . . .

Start this practice by just using a simple phrase like “consent to the presence of God,” just spontaneously letting that phrase go through [your] mind daily. Now of course people are going to respond to the presence of God in the way that corresponds to where their ego is. But if their heart is in the right place . . . some higher, deeper, wider aspects of their awareness will kick in . . . [to recognize] the second face of Spirit.

Without using traditional, patriarchal symbols of trinity or even mentioning the word “trinity,” Ken Wilber gives a satisfying reflection on it entirely consistent with Christian theology. He successfully bridges Christian orthodoxy with post-Christian spirituality.

I take it as more evidence that we can find common ground between widely divergent spiritual beliefs.

Spiritual, not religious

Tom Shepherd writes an excellent column, “That’s a Good Question,” for Unity magazine, which fosters “practical spirituality for daily living.” In the November/December issue, he comments that those who claim to be “spiritual, not religious” disparage organizations dedicated to the Divine. Good point.

But I find the distinction “spiritual, not religious” useful for communicating with persons turned off by religion, atheists, for instance, and some agnostics. To my observation, they can be intensely spiritual but hate religion, seeing nothing good in it and resisting evidence of any good done by it.

Atheists are driven by spiritual conviction. Because of it, they are disgusted by religious corruption and aggression, but they deny that they have spiritual beliefs because they conflate them with religious beliefs. Religions are types or brands of spirituality, in Shepherd’s words, “a trail of settlements along the path to support” our spiritual journey, but I see that atheists practice spirituality without such support.

As I wrote in “Food, shamans, atheists, lesbians” (a few posts down), I can find common ground with atheists when I distinguish between spiritual and religious and when I interpret Christian language non-literally. This is quite an achievement because atheists detest worship of the Christian god that Shepherd rightly says “does not exist.” I cherish the comment of the atheist who said I comforted her and take it as evidence that I showed respect for atheist spirituality.

For more on this subject see my column Does God exist? Wrong question!

Always More

No one commented on my previous post, but I have a comment. What I wrote could be misunderstood as reducing the Ultimate to the inner human divinity, what’s inside each of us, but regular readers of my blog have seen my posts on divine Transcendence, what I’ve even called the More.

In Hinduism, this transcendent Divinity is called Brahman, and the inner Self—the immanent divinity—is called Atman. They correspond to God and Christ, terms more understandable to those coming out of a Christian background.

What’s important is knowing that our reach for the Holy can never completely, definitively grasp it.

Christian atheist

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(from the “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot)

I can call myself a Catholic Christian atheist. In the second half of the 1960s, I tried to be an atheist, not successfully. In the 1980s I learned that spirituality reigns in my life, that it trumps everything else and this explains my unbreakable ties to the religion I was born into. I can’t stop being Catholic, and I also can’t stop thinking about spiritual matters, which has led me to critically examining the beliefs of my childhood religion.

When I get together with past classmates (who remind me of my Catholic faith decades ago), I confess I’m bored if they want to tell me how many kids and grandkids they have, but I like hearing how they and their kids are opening doors of the mind. I want to know how people are evolving in ways that matter—wisdom and emotional/spiritual maturity.

My evolution has brought me the realization that Christians and atheists share common spiritual ground. Most atheists I know embrace humanism, a deep respect for the dignity and ability of humans. This connects well with the Christ symbol, the inner divinity or conscience in every person, the higher Self, the center of integrity.

I realize atheists chafe at the word “divine” because they associate this word with religion’s worship of outer gods. But I wonder how many can resonate with these words from Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson.

Christ is constantly being immaculately conceived and born, is confounding elders, teaching, being betrayed, being crucified, dying, resurrecting, and is making an ascension. All of these are occurring in every moment;

They occur in atheists too. Atheists who suffer on the cross of condemnation for expressing their true beliefs. Of course, I do not include the rash and polarizing activities of some atheists who make headlines. I am thinking of atheist friends with whom I identify.

How am I an atheist? As a non-theist, I reject worship of a god as an object outside of my deepest human self. How am I a Christian? I embrace the Christ as a symbol of the inner guide nudging us toward ever greater spiritual transformation, of becoming ever more divine. I realize the symbol’s significance on a new, profound level. I arrive back where I started and “know the place for the first time.”