Darwin, Freud, and the Power of Myth
We can discuss with dispassion the confusions and anguish of someone else’s earlier hinge time, but can we discuss with anything even close to objective dispassion the confusions and anguish of our own? Probably not, especially if we jump right into analyzing where we are at this point in time. But we can, with a minimum of effort, climb up on the back of the last century or so of history and take a fairly clear sighting of how North American Christians got from where we were to where we are; and perspective generally alleviates anxiety enough to make the effort of climbing worthwhile.
The simultaneous pocking of our story and our consensual illusion as North American (and also, in this case, as Western) Christians is the result of persistent bombardment from many sources. Yet even given that plethora, few if any religion scholars and analysts have trouble naming Science as the principal agent of successful challenge to a story and an imagination that had been in place, more or less securely, from the post-Reformation right up until the middle of the nineteenth century.
Darwin . . . and Faraday
When exactly, in the mid-1800s, the die was cast, depends on whom one asks. Most commonly, lay analysts point to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species as the tipping point that sent us careening off into new cultural, social, political, and theological territory. Physicists themselves, however, tend to place the pivot point at 1851. In that year, Michael Faraday stepped down as professor of chemistry at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, England. In the sixteen years between Faraday’s retirement from active teaching and his death in 1867, his theories and discoveries about field theory came to capture the popular imagination in a way that they had previously not done.
Most North Americans know who Darwin was. Most of us even have opinions about his theory of evolution (though relatively few of us have read what he had to say in his own words when he said it). Almost none of us, however, talk about, let alone read, Michael Faraday. Yet Faraday did as much to rattle the bars of premodernity as did anyone short of Darwin and Einstein themselves.
What he did in the years of his active life as a teaching chemist, among other things, was to discover and describe electromagnetic rotations and electromagnetic induction, the principle on which electric transformers and electric generators work. In effect, what that meant was that electricity ceased to be an interesting toy and became the base for almost every part of the technology that first spawned and then enabled the postmodernism within which the Great Emergence is coalescing. At a more immediately theological level, Faraday contended that there was no ether and no matter, as physical substances. There were, instead, fields of forces like electricity and magnetism and gravity that, albeit unseen, girded everything. When and where the invisible lines of the force fields intersected, they created matter, light being no more than the vibration or motion of the intersecting forces. So much for mystery and angels or spirits descending in light or as light. So much for leaving the invisible as too divine to tamper with. So much for thinking that everything that looked miraculous really was.
Whether one says that it was Faraday’s work or Darwin’s theory that marks the beginning of the shifts leading to the Great Emergence is of little moment, actually. The two of them together are, without question, the line of demarcation between post-Reformation and peri-Emergence ways of thinking, being, and believing. They also embodied what would become two of the major member-disciplines or components of twentieth-century science: biology and physics (though Faraday would probably have been confused to find the latter label applied to his work). In consort with each other and the sciences that came out of them, biology and physics were to split the cable open, tear the story, snag the sleeve, and lay out to public view the braided strand.
The word biologist does not itself appear in English until 1874. By that time, however, Darwinian theory had already begun to seep into theological as well as academic conversation. Within twenty years, the threat of evolution and the kind of biblical criticism and liberal theology it and other concomitant trends were seen as empowering had reached such a pitch that a series of Bible Conferences of Conservative Protestants were held at various sites in the United States. In 1895, the Conference of Conservative Protestants, meeting in Niagara Falls, issued a statement of five principles necessary to claim true Christian belief: the inerrancy of the Scripture; the divinity of Jesus Christ; the historicity of the Virgin birth; the substitutionary nature of the Atonement; and the physical, corporeal return of Jesus, the Christ. Those five principles of doctrine would become “the Fundamentals.” By 1910, the Conservative Protestants body would begin publishing a magazine called The Fundamentals; and the word fundamentalist would enter our language as the label for a very clearly defined mind-set. Such clarity has feathered out a bit in the century since, but the five principles of the Niagara meeting, along with the two others of the obligation to evangelize and belief in Jesus as a personal savior, have held firm as the core of evangelical Christianity.
One of the Great Emergence’s central thrusts over the closing decades of the twentieth century and since has been to attempt an accommodation between the fundamentals of the evangelicalism out of which many Emergents have come and the theology of the more religiously and culturally diverse Great Emergence itself. Among the first, major accommodations that has to transpire early in a hinge time is this very process. That which has held hegemony, finding itself under attack, always must drop back, re-entrench itself, run up its colors in defiance, and demand that the invaders attack its stronghold on its own terms. In religion as in warfare, things never quite work out that way; but there is a period in which the invaders do hesitate, trying to figure out how and why, with guns in their hands, they should want to attack the fort with bows and arrows, or something very analogous to that.
Freud, Jung, and Campbell
But biology and/or medicine were creating more mayhem than just a backward-looking evolutionary thought or explanation. Born in 1856, Sigmund Freud, before he was done, would open up to public view a whole new landscape, namely that of the unconscious. While the concept of conscious versus unconscious states of being was as old as religion itself—it can be found in Vedic literature, for example—Freud’s genius was in building constructs or models of “mind” that, by their very articulation, demanded further investigation. In a sense, Freud was the Amerigo Vespucci of the Great Emergence: he declared beyond refute the presence of a whole New World which, it is fair to say, was effectively unknown to, and unperceived by, earlier eras of human history.
After Freud, Carl Jung, born in Switzerland in 1875, extended the exploration of this New World and achieved what Freud did not. That is, Jung’s was a steadier, less neurotic and prickly personality, and his writings were accessible to laity and scholars alike. He built on Freud, certainly, but his paintings and word-sketches of the subjective life were mystical enough and lyrical enough to entice readers who would never have paid more than passing attention to Freud. And Jung opened the forest beyond Freud’s beachhead by speaking of a collective unconscious, just as he further opened up the concept of libido that was primal soil for both.
Jung’s career would be generative, as well, not only in terms of his own writing, but also in terms of his enormous influence on later thinkers. He was a motivating force behind Joseph Campbell, for example. It would be very difficult, in speaking of the coming of the Great Emergence, to overestimate the power of Campbell in the disestablishment of what is called “the Christian doctrine of particularity” and “Christian exclusivity.” That doctrine and principle, in duet, hold that Jesus and Jesus only is God-among-us and that there is no salvation for humankind anywhere anytime independent of belief in Jesus. Both those dogmas held almost total, popular sway in the early and mid-1900s in North American Christianity. It was Campbell who would first successfully challenge and, near the end of the twentieth century, successfully begin to rout them in popular thought. But then, Campbell, like Luther, had an advantage that Freud, like Wycliffe, did not. Campbell had a new technology of mass communication infinitely better than any that Freud had ever even dreamed of having.
The Advent of Radio and Television
The telegraph, when it came into general use—thanks, of course, to Michael Faraday and others, like James Clerk Maxwell, who followed him—was a huge boon to the rapid exchange of information in a way that was more or less analogous to the first exchanges empowered by Gutenberg’s earliest presses. Radio, when it came into broad, popular use in the 1930s, was another major leap forward. Far more ubiquitous than the telegraph and far easier to produce and transmit copy for, it became Everyman’s (and Everywoman’s) contact with a larger world that had previously been “known about” only somewhat after the fact and “experienced” not at all. Now the world was just a dial away. But by the mid-1940s, there was television . . . expensive, snowy screened, demanding of time, but there. Really there. A movie theater in one’s living room, a world at one’s fingertips, just waiting to be both seen and heard.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen was probably the first professional religionist to realize the immense potential of television as a means for shaping religion in the laity; but in impact, the bishop was an amateur compared to Joseph Campbell. Campbell, born in 1904 and a scholar in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion, taught for thirty-eight years at Sarah Lawrence College. During those years, he produced a number of books, but two of them in particular were to change the course of American Christianity. The four-volume set, The Masks of God, and his magnum opus, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, were and are authoritative attacks (whether that was the motivation behind their composition, or not) upon Christian exclusivity and particularity. How deep and broad and lasting the influence of those books would have been, had they been left to stand alone, no one will ever now know.
In his late seventies and early eighties, well after his retirement from Sarah Lawrence, Campbell teamed up with Bill Moyers to produce a PBS series entitled The Power of Myth. Campbell died after the filming was complete but before the series was aired, so he never lived to see the confirmation of his belief that it was in television that one educated and shaped a culture’s thought. And shape it did. The universality and commonality of religious thought and sensibilities was spread out across America’s living rooms for all to see. University-educated professional and high school dropout alike were being taught by two of the nation’s most skilled communicators; and in due time, the inevitable result was a direct assault from the pew onto the pulpit.
The popularity of The Power of Myth rested certainly on its excellence and in part on Moyers’s genius as well as Campbell’s. The series, at the time of this writing, still stands as the single, most popular and most frequently purchased one in PBS’s history. But it also triggered a whole new generation of expanded readership for Campbell’s books; and together, books and series persuaded much of North American Christendom that exclusivity and particularity were a hard, if not an impossible, sell. What of solus christus, not to mention sola scriptura?
A challenge that would have been rejected by believers as clerical heresy had it been delivered from the pulpit was now being listened to and thought about and talked about around watercoolers and over backyard fences. Why? In large part because Campbell and Moyers had understood that hearing something when one is in one’s own home, relaxed among one’s own family and surroundings, enjoying not only a bit of rest in one’s easy chair but also perchance a bit of refreshment as well, is vastly and effectually different from hearing the same thing in public and sacrosanct space while sitting, dressed for show, among one’s social associates or—God forbid—one’s betters. The mind comes out to play with the imagination in the former; it dare not come out at all in the latter, at least not visibly.
But as powerful as Campbell’s influence on popular as well as scholarly religious thought has been over the decades since his death, another part of Jung’s legacy has been equally powerful in a more indirect way. In fairness, we should speak in this regard not of Jung’s work alone but of Jung in concert, not only with Freud’s legacy, but also with the early or transitional work of men and women like Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Erik Erikson, and others who built on the work of either or both of them.
The New Self
As these thinkers and experimenters, and many, many other gifted scholars like them, pushed farther and farther into the interior, their efforts attracted the interest of whole coteries of other scientists—of biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, linguists, anthropologists, artists, physicists, and philosophers—all of whom in one way or another began to question the old, standing definitions of “self.” Equally important is the fact that the experts in these fields of relatively established sciences were joined by men and women who were expert in fields of science that had not even existed two or three human generations earlier . . . experts in electronic computation, in computer science, the Internet/the World Wide Web/www 2.0, in chaos math and network theory, in nanotechnology, in artificial intelligence, in post-human theory and ethics.
It was a revolution in progress right in front of our very eyes and in full view of anyone who wanted to flip something, whether that something be the pages of a popular book, magazine, or newspaper, or simply the switches on a television set, a radio, a computer, or a cell phone. This revolution was not happening in some faraway land or behind some curtain of distance and esoteric learnedness, either. This one was in your face, up close, and personal, because this one taunts every one of us . . . who are you, there in the mirror? . . . what are you, human or machine, agent and actor or puppet and victim? . . . how do you know? . . . what does it mean, this “knowing” thing? . . . how do you know you know? . . . yoo-hoo, who’s in there and where?
We had long known (at least, in the centuries since medicine began doing autopsies, anyway) that René Descartes’ theory of a homunculus “self” resident somewhere in the center-brain in each of us was foolishness. In the 1640s, Descartes had satisfied the angst of post-Reformation imagination quite effectively by postulating that very thing, however. He had taught that body and mind are two entirely different things, res extensa and res cogitans. Like some twenty-first-century night watchman monitoring his TV screens in the lobby of a skyscraper, Descartes said there was a “self,” a little person separate from every part of the body, that monitored events and governed individual human existence and conduct. Descartes proved his own existence as a “self” to himself by his now-clichéd axiom of “Cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am.” That woefully inadequate definition of our humanness is now spoken of by cognitive scientists as “The Cartesian Error” or “Descartes’ Error,” or even, sometimes, as “René’s Folly.”[7]
The term cognitive science was not even around until 1973, when it was first used in conjunction with work in artificial intelligence. As a label, however, it was destined to spread rapidly and encompass much. The result is that the cognitive sciences now include a vast array of subdisciplines and burgeoning areas of research, all of them having to do with Descartes’s old anathema: What are we/what am I? Is there even such a thing as the “self”? Is “mind” the same as, or different from, “brain”? If so, how can “I” be? More to the point, how can “I” be held responsible for anything anywhere anytime? If not, then what is “mind” and where does it dwell and of what is it made? The questions are endless, as are the media sources willing and able to broadcast them, unanswered, into every North American life.
Who, indeed, asks the citizen of these times, goes to my prayers when I pray? Where in me is the responsible part? Where is that same part in the front-page murderer or in my neighbor, the pedophile? What does God exist in relation to? What is a soul and what do we mean when we say we work to save something that may not even be? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, until we are as sick of the questions as we are of the anguish and confusion from which they come.
Essential Questions
But even our sense of existential sickness and near defeat are as they should be.
That is to say, they are of one piece with the historic pattern that we are once more reenacting. Each time of re-formation has the same central question: Where, now, is the authority? But each reconfiguration also has at least two dominant, unrelenting questions that attend it and may or may not be unique to it. The question of “Where now is our authority?” is the fundamental or foundational question of all human existence and/or endeavor, be it individual or that of a larger, social unit. Without an answer to it, the individual personality or the personality of the group at large alike fall into disarray and ultimate chaos. It is Hell where there is no answer to that question.
The two or more questions that are particular to any one, given re-formation era are of a somewhat lesser magnitude, not in the agitation they evoke, but in the focus of their answers. They are, in a sense, always subsets of the authority question. Once answered, they become vehicles of a sort for transmitting the identity of the newly established authority into the politics, economics, learned disciplines, cohesive culture, and legal norms of a society as well as into its religious institutions and codes. Religion empowers the answers by sanctifying them; but it is itself not so much defined by those answers as it is characterized by them. It is the authority answer which defines.
The two overarching, but complementary questions of the Great Emergence are: (1) What is human consciousness and/or the humanness of the human? and (2) What is the relation of all religions to one another—or, put another way, how can we live responsibly as devout and faithful adherents of one religion in a world of many religions? Those torturous questions, which have bobbed along in human history for centuries, now come to us with a militant ferocity, a ferocity that enjoys a line of direct, uninterrupted descent straight down from Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin. The other great truth here is that we cannot be said to have truly entered into any kind of post-Emergence stability until we have answered both of them.
The assertive presence in general conversation of the central question of authority is evidence that a re-formation is in process. The assertive presence in general conversation nowadays of two, equally unresolved but clearly defined and related, secondary questions is evidence that this particular re-formation of ours is deep into process. We have looked at the two or three intellectual and technological tsunamis of the last hundred and fifty years that determined the nature and definition of what our secondary questions would be. Obviously, those disruptions in the cultural and intellectual status quo have contributed energy and urgency also to the larger question of where authority should be located. But before we begin to look at the Great Emergence itself and how it may be expected to address our re-formation questions, we need to look at one other part of the puzzle.
Emerging Christians are the immediate products of the twentieth century. What they see, what they do, and the materials with which they work were all shaped by a particular place in time and space. What they can imagine and even what they can actually accomplish will likewise be both characterized and enabled by the context of a particular culture present in a particular time. Before we look at the Great Emergence itself, then, we need to consider, at least briefly, a few of the major cultural shifts in the twentieth century that have determined the religious and ecclesial perspectives out of which emergents are working.
An overview like the one that follows here is hardly the sum of our current situation, nor is it the whole of what is and is making the Great Emergence. Quite the contrary. The full list of precipitating and defining events runs somewhere in excess of three dozen discrete and distinct items. Some of those shifts—the ones we will look at—are so major that they cannot be glossed over by a simple listing. Some of them can be. Others of them may best be served by waiting for a longer, more detailed treatment than this one. For the purposes of a general overview, however, it hopefully will suffice if we look chronologically at a select few of the more obvious pivotal events or changes that violated the cable of post-Reformation meaning and exposed its braided strands to the rough handling of the last decades of the twentieth century and the opening one of the twenty-first.[8]