Category Archives: Religion

Sacred relics

Middle Way Philosophy, Religion,

The other day I found a piece of the Berlin Wall: a rough shard of concrete about 3cm x 1 cm, largely grey apart from red on one side, and gift-wrapped in cellophane with a ribbon. It was given to me by a student from Berlin in 1990 (when I was teaching English as a foreign language to German students). When I re-discovered this piece, though, I began to wonder why this otherwise insignificant piece of concrete had been preserved, what it ‘meant’, and why we preserve such things. I began to realise that what I held in my hand was a sacred relic: along with the many splinters from the true cross, phials of the Virgin’s milk, bones of saints and teeth of the Buddha preserved around the world.

Those of a naturalistic (or perhaps just a Protestant) leaning tend to sneer at sacred relics on the grounds that they are fraudulent. It is most unlikely, and indeed can probably be proved by further investigation (carbon dating etc.) that most of the sacred relics in the world are not literally what they claim to be. If one thinks of religion in terms of belief that is a matter of concern, but from the standpoint of meaning prior to belief it matters little. I don’t want to defend fraudulent claims about medieval relics, but at the same time the significance of those relics to religious practitioners probably has little to do with their material origins. Instead they are objects invested with a certain symbolic significance: fetishes, idols, charms, souvenirs, mementos.

I have rather less reason to doubt that my shard of the Berlin Wall is ‘authentic’ – but if it Berlin Wall hole Jurek Durczakwasn’t, this would really have no impact on its significance. Its value as a symbolic object depends only on its connection with the destruction of the Berlin Wall. If one was looking for an event to poignantly symbolise the Middle Way and integration, the destruction of the Berlin Wall might well be it. Entrenched ideologies swept away and false divisions removed by the autonomous actions of the people – what better symbol of Migglism is there than that? It’s all the more poignant as a symbol of the Middle Way because most of the people destroying the Berlin Wall probably didn’t think of it explicitly in that way – but nevertheless they felt the joy of integration and recognised the widened horizons that occur when dogmas are removed.

The significance of the relic, then (whether medieval or modern, ‘religious’ or ‘secular’) comes not from its physical origins but from the projections we put on it. Those projections can themselves often become stuck. I think this is what the monotheistic religions mean by ‘idolatry’ (in Islam, where it’s a very important concept, the term is shirk). If you start to think that the object, rather than just reminding you of some other significant event, concept or person, in some way gives you a shortcut to the fulfilment or integration you would get directly from them, then you are starting to fetishise or idolise the object. That means that you are giving it absolute qualities that it cannot possess. If I were to set up a Migglist shrine giving pride of place to my shard of the Berlin Wall, and expecting veneration of the shard to provide the fulfilment that the destruction of the Berlin Wall (or its equivalents in my life) actually does, then I would have turned my previous mere appreciation of the meaning of the shard into a set of obstructive metaphysical beliefs about it. This would be failing to appreciate why it does have significance to me – that is, as something that relates to my bodily experience rather than a copy of the thing-out-there.

How do we know when we have crossed that line of absolutising a mere reminder? Well, one test might well be whether we can treat the mere reminder as such – changing it or even destroying it in the full appreciation that by doing so we do not change what it symbolises. There’s a well known story about a Zen monk burning Buddha images to keep warm. If you have a shrine of objects you venerate – whether they are Buddhas, family photos, souvenirs or special books – could you happily destroy those objects? Could I take the shard of concrete that I believe to be from the Berlin Wall, throw it away and substitute another shard of concrete? Could the Catholics who venerate a splinter from the True Cross substitute another splinter from a handy nearby fence? Destroying our idols sounds to me like quite a therapeutic exercise, provided you do have a strong sense of the continuing value of what the object symbolises apart from the object.

The problem with this approach is that it can easily get confused with the long history of iconoclasm (destruction of icons) in Christianity and Islam. The original iconoclasts smashed up the icons in Byzantine churches, and the Islamic tradition followed by destroying Christian, Hindu and Buddhist ‘idols’, which they regarded as false gods interceding in our relationship to the true God. To this day you won’t see any pictures of people or animals in a mosque – only perhaps calligraphy or abstract ornamentation based on vegetation. I think the trouble with this is that in the place of fetishized objects or pictures Muslims have substituted words – the words of the Qur’an which were believed to be God’s words. Although they seem to have understood the dangers of absolutising objects or pictures, those dangers lie in the beliefs we have about them, not in the objects themselves or even their significance to us, and it is no advance to substitute other more abstract absolute beliefs for absolute beliefs about objects.

So, my suggestion is that we need to recognise that we all have sacred relics, in the sense of objects to which we attach special significance. The use of terms like ‘mantelpiece’ rather than ‘shrine’ for the places we keep these objects does not stop them being sacred or having a religious dimension. We can enjoy and celebrate that special significance – whether in art, ritual, reflection or conversation – without absolutising those objects or having metaphysical beliefs about them. If we are to stay with the meaning of those objects and enjoy them positively, a recognition and exploration of the distinction between meaning and belief seems crucial, as does a critical sense of when we might be investing our sacred relics with properties they cannot possess.

 

Picture: Hole in the Berlin Wall by Jurek Durczak – CCA 2.0

The MWS Podcast 34: Andrew Brown on Religion

Podcast, Religion,

This week’s guest is the journalist and author of the award-winning book ‘Fishing in Utopia’. He writes a regular column in the Guardian on themes concerned with religion and this is the topic of the conversation today.


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Middle Way Thinkers 6: Jesus

Great Thinkers, Myth, Religion, The Arts,

Was Jesus a Middle Way Thinker? Largely not. His beliefs seem to have included many absolutes, and he has also been interpreted since in terms of those absolutes. Yet in this series I also want to encourage incremental thinking. I want to suggest that there are some important ways in which Jesus moved forward from the dogmas of his time, which amount to some specific instances of Middle Way thought. I’d suggest that it is due to these new ways that he addressed the conditions of his time that he gets much of his power. Particularly for those of us from a Christian background (which includes me), I think it’s important to re-examine Jesus in a critical way: one that tries to separate out the dogmas of Christian tradition from those elements that might helpfully speak to our experience.

However, this is a loaded subject, so I’d better start with some clarifications. On the one hand, I’m not interested in supporting any of the dogmas of the Christian tradition about Jesus: either that he was the Son of God, affirmed as some type of supernatural status, or that everything he uttered was ‘true’ and the Word of God. But nor, on the other hand, am I interested in historical revisionism, which seems to be the opposite trap for those interested in re-examining Jesus. I don’t want to make any claims about what Jesus “really” was, or believed, or meant to say. I’m content to work with the Jesus accepted by Christian tradition, and depicted in the four canonical gospels, because that is what ‘Jesus’ effectively means to most people today. I’m looking for insights or symbolic inspiration, rather than historical revelation, in this traditional depiction of Jesus, without getting swallowed up by the various scholarly quagmires of Biblical Studies. The third extreme I’d also want to avoid here, is the mere rejection of Jesus as a source of insights or inspiration. For me, and I suspect many others in the West, Jesus is a powerful archetypal figure, both because of his role in Western art and culture and because of his influence through the Christian churches (very much associated, for me, with childhood experience as a minister’s son).

Let me also briefly note some of the aspects of Jesus that I think are pretty unhelpful. There’s the virgin birth, the idealised childhood, and the sense of divine destiny as the son of God. There are the miracles: at least where these are presented not as acts of compassion but (as particularly in the gospel of John) as signs of divine status. There’s the self-sacrificial aspect: he appears to have basically offered himself up as a sacrifice, aware that he was walking into a trap that would result in his death in Jerusalem, but still doing it. In his trial before Pilate he also seems guilty of false modesty, not offering even a moderate defence to draw people’s attention to his innocence. It seems possible that he believed God would save him from the cross (accounting for ‘My God! Why have you forsaken me?’), because of his profound belief in cosmic justice and an imminent doomsday. Finally, if we follow the role of Jesus in Christian tradition, there’s the interpretation of Jesus’s death as an atonement for human original sin, and the belief in his resurrection as a further sign of divinity and a proof of eternal life for the saved: all these are damaging dogmas by which the moral complexity of our experience is overlaid with crude diagnoses and crude magical solutions.

But, if we can manage to leave all that stuff aside, let’s try to focus on some of the ways that Jesus can be inspiring and insightful – corresponding also to ways that he moves towards the Middle Way. I’d suggest that these fall into two categories: one of these is helpful elements in Jesus’s moral teaching, and the other is helpful archetypal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus as the Son of God.

Much of Jesus’s moral teaching involves a struggle with the Pharisees, who were a sect of Jewish legalists, and the Sadducees, who were conservatives associated with the priestly elite at the Jerusalem temple. Jesus is excoriating about rigid observance of tradition or adherence to the letter of the law, instead urging awareness of motive and the spirit behind the law. For example, when his disciples plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath (against the laws that forbid harvesting on the sabbath, which would be work) and were criticised by the Pharisees, Jesus said “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He also emphasised motive in urging people not to be showy about giving alms, “Your good deed must be secret” (Matthew 6:4). From today’s perspective, to merely emphasise motive in ethics is not enough, because our motives vary so much along with our unintegrated desires. However, this emphasis was a major step forward in a context where people were thinking of ethics only as an extension of law, in the form of rigid social rules. On the other hand, Jesus seems to be trying to strike a Middle Way in relation to the Jewish Law, because he does not reject it either: “Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to complete” (Matthew 5:17).

Jesus is also well-known for his teaching of ‘turning the other cheek’ – the apparent pacifism of “Do not resist those who wrong you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). The key insight here is the necessity of avoiding fruitless conflict. Rather than offering one rigid position in response to another, we need to find ways of reducing (an not acting on) the narrow egoistic identification we may have with ‘winning’ when someone challenges us. However, I also think that the Pacifist interpretation of this verse develops another kind of dogma. If we read it as forbidding violence in all circumstances whatsoever, then we rule out the possibility of violence addressing conditions in some circumstances where it might be the best response.

Jesus also offers what might be regarded as a brief equivalent to the Kalama Sutta in Buddhism, offering the suggestion that we need to consult experience when confronted with a conflict between different dogmatic claims. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you dressed as sheep while underneath they are savage wolves. You will recognise them by their fruit. Can grapes be plucked from briars, or figs from thistles? A good tree always yields sound fruit, and a poor tree bad fruit” (Matthew 7:15-17).  Here he seems to be suggesting that verbal claims are not enough, and one of the ways we can judge the justification of conflicting claims is by their integration, evident in people’s behaviour. Again, we could take this to another extreme, by rejecting a person’s view whenever there is a shade of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy does not necessarily make people’s claims untrue, but it is a useful warning sign.

Much more could be said about Jesus’ moral teaching, but I must keep this post brief. More broadly, too, I think Jesus’ symbolic role should also be mentioned. His traditional position in Christianity as ‘Son of God’, both wholly human and wholly divine (according to the Nicene Creed) does not have to be merely rejected as a dogmatic belief, because its meaning can be separated from such beliefs. That meaning is one I encounter very frequently in Renaissance art, where I encounter Jesus as what sometimes seem to be an attempt to represent the Middle Way in human experience. The symbolic richness of Jesus’s status as both divine and human is one way of confronting the profound ambiguity of the relationship between perfect ideals and imperfect experience, the ‘truth on the edge’, or necessity of maintaining a robust conception of truth without claiming to possess it. Jesus is full of contradictions: he is both vulnerable and powerful, wise and foolish, alive and dead, but these contradictions are only damaging as objects of incoherent belief. As symbols, on the other hand, their ambiguity can help us to recognise both the conflicts in our own experience and the ways we can work with those conflicts.

Orozco_Christ_cuts_his_CrossWestern art often depicts Jesus in three particular forms: as an infant, in his crucifixion, and in his resurrection. All of these, I think, can be appreciated as offering evocations of that symbolic richness. As an infant he represents the incarnation, that strange ambiguous middle way between divine and human. On the cross he represents the unbearable and unjust suffering of the human condition when understood in relation to divine perfection. When resurrected, he shows the perseverance of hope: that the good can still come through human experience even when we least expect it, when we have come to terms with the conditions of human life. The picture here is an intriguing one by the Mexican artist Orozco. There are many ways of reading it, either as a symbol of resurrection, or as an anti-theistic statement in which mere humanity triumphs.

I have passed through a number of stages in my response to Jesus. As a child and teenager, I mainly had a negative reaction to the idealised figure I was presented with, who was being foisted on me, but didn’t at all seem to represent the qualities I would have chosen to idealise or to worship. At times, however, I also tried out that idealisation, though I had great difficulty making it my own. I then started to see Jesus primarily as a swindle: an attempt to magically jump across the difficulties of human life. Now, however, I’m quite clear about rejecting a lot of the religious claptrap that surrounds beliefs around Jesus, but at the same time I think I am beginning to develop  a relationship with him both as a man and as an icon. As a moral teacher, he can be inspiring, but does not seem to me as hugely significant as he is often cut out to be, and a lot of contextualisation is needed to see how he was moving towards the Middle Way. As an archetypal symbol, though, he means a lot more, and that meaning develops a little almost every time I step into an art gallery.

Postscript (2018)

This article was written in 2014, and since then I have written a whole book, The Christian Middle Way, that is now being published. In that book I give a much more detailed interpretation of Jesus with rather more reference to the gospels. Although this article gives an idea of the direction I was heading in a couple of years before I wrote the book, the view of Jesus that I arrived at subsequently is in many respects more positive than this one.

Robert M. Ellis

The MWS Podcast: Episode 26, Martine Batchelor on Ethics from a Buddhist perspective

Ethics, Religion, ,

In this episode Martine Batchelor, a Buddhist teacher and author talks about ethics from a Buddhist perspective and to what extent it differs from more rule based ethical positions. We also explore topics such as absolutism versus relativism, karma, ‘engaged’ Buddhism, the precept of non-harming, laying people off, prisons and her understanding of the Middle Way.


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The Trouble with Revisionism

Critical Thinking, History, Psychology, Religion, , ,

Almost everything we do is in some way an attempt to improve on what went before. Even tidying up a room involves what we see as an improvement on its previous state. When we consider traditions of human thought and activity, too, each new development of a tradition tries to address a new condition of some kind and thus also remedy a defect: for example, the Reformation was a response to dogmatic limitations and perceived abuses in the Catholic church, and new artistic movements respond to what they see as the aesthetic limitations of the previous movements that inspired them.

In many ways, then, its not surprising that both individuals and groups gradually evolve new ways of doing things in response to past tradition or custom. What creates a problem, though, is when we essentialise that tradition and try to appropriate its whole moral weight to justify our current approach: believing that we have found the ultimately right solution, the true answer, or the ultimately correct interpretation of that tradition. When we do that, we’re not just contributing to a new development that we acknowledge to be different from what went before, but also imposing that development on the past. In effect, we’re projecting the present onto the past. Revisionism - Executed Yezhov removed from photo of StalinThis is an approach to things for which ‘revisionism’ seems to be a good label, though it’s most typically been used for those who more formally impose their preconceptions on the interpretation of history, such as holocaust deniers. This photo shows such revisionism in action in the Soviet Union: the executed commissar Yezhov removed from a photo featuring Stalin.

In a sense, we’re all revisionists to some degree, since this tendency to appropriate and essentialise the past is wrapped up in common fallacies and cognitive biases that we might all slip into. We’re especially likely to do this when considering our own past, for example underestimating the extent to which our mature experience differs from our youth and projecting the benefit of hindsight onto our judgements in the past. In working on my next book Middle Way Philosophy 4: The Integration of Belief, I’ve been thinking a lot about these cognitive biases around time recently. There are many concerned with the present and the future, or with non-specific times, as well as the past, so I won’t try to discuss them all, but just a couple that focus particularly on the past.

In terms of Critical Thinking, the fallacy of absolutising the past is equivalent to the Irrelevant Appeal to History or Irrelevant Appeal to Tradition. This is when someone assumes that because something was the case in the past that necessarily makes it true or justified now. Simple examples might be “We haven’t admitted women to the club in the hundred years of our existence – we can’t start now! It would undermine everything we stand for!” Or “When we go to the pub we always take turns to pay for a round of drinks. When it’s your round you have to pay – it’s as simple as that.”

A common cognitive bias that works on the same basis is the Sunk Cost Fallacy, which Daniel Kahneman writes about. When we’ve put a lot of time, effort, or money into something, even if it’s not achieving what we hoped, we are very reluctant to let go of it. Companies who have invested money in big projects that turn out to have big cost overruns and diminishing prospects of return will nevertheless often pursue them, sending “good money after bad”. The massively expensive Concorde project in the 1970’s is a classic example of governments also doing this. But as individuals we also have an identifiable tendency to fail to let go of things we’ve invested in: whether it’s houses, relationships, books or business ventures. The Sunk Cost Fallacy involves an absolutisation of what we have done in the past, so that we fail to compare it fairly to new evidence in the present. In effect, we also revise our understanding of the present so that it fits our unexamined assumptions about the value of events in the past.

I think the Sunk Cost Fallacy also figures in revisionist attitudes to religious, philosophical and moral traditions. It’s highly understandable, perhaps, that if you’ve sunk a large portion of your life into the culture, symbolism and social context of a particular religious tradition, for example, but then you encounter a lot of conflicts between the assumptions that dominate that tradition and the conditions that need to be addressed in the present, there is going to be a strong temptation to try to revise that tradition rather than to abandon it. Since that tradition provides a lot of our meaning – our vocabulary and a whole set of ways of symbolising and conceptualising – it’s clear that we cannot just abandon what that tradition means to us. We can acknowledge that, but at the same time I think we need to resist the revisionist impulse that is likely to accompany it. The use and gradual adaptation of meaning from past traditions doesn’t have to be accompanied by claims that we have a new, true, or correct interpretation of that tradition. Instead we should just try to admit that we have a new perspective, influenced by past traditions but basically an attempt to respond to new circumstances.

That, at any rate, is what I have been trying to do with Middle Way Philosophy. I acknowledge my debt to Buddhism, as well as Christianity and various other Western traditions of thought. However, I try not to slip into the claim that I have the correct or true interpretation of any of these traditions, or indeed the true message of their founders. For example, I have a view about the most useful interpretation of the Buddha’s Middle Way – one that I think Buddhists would be wise to adopt to gain the practical benefits of the Buddha’s insights. However, I don’t claim to know what the Buddha ‘really meant’ or to have my finger on ‘true Buddhism’. Instead, all beliefs need to be judged in terms of their practical adequacy to present circumstances.

This approach also accounts for the measure of disagreement I have had with three recent contributors to our podcasts: Stephen Batchelor, Don Cupitt and Mark Vernon. I wouldn’t want to exaggerate that degree of disagreement, as our roads lie together for many miles. and in each case I think that dialogue with the society and exploration of the relationship of their ideas to the Middle Way has been, and may continue to be, fruitful. However, it seems to me on the evidence available that Batchelor, Cupitt and Vernon each want to adopt revisionist views of the Buddha, Jesus and Plato respectively. I’m not saying that any of those revisionist views are necessarily wrong, but only that I think it’s a mistake to rely on a reassessment of a highly ambiguous and debatable past as a starting-point for developing an adequate response to present conditions. In each case, we may find elements of inspiration or insight in the ‘revised’ views – but please let’s try to let go of the belief that ‘what they really meant’ is in any sense a useful thing to try to establish. In the end, this attachment to ‘what they really meant’ seems to be largely an indicator of sunk costs on our part.