Deity, Discernment and Faith

John Halstead shared a very interesting post the other day, titled "The role of faith and hubris in Paganism," which has sparked a lot of thought and commenting from me. Below, I'm just going to re-post some of the (far too verbose) comments I've left both on his blog, and on a response posted by one of the people he quotes in his post.

My initial response to his blog post was:

I do wonder, though, if much of the character of faith-based hard polytheism is influenced specifically by Protestant and Evangelical denominations of Christianity, particularly here in the U.S. Long before I became a Pagan, I found myself having these kinds of conversations because I was raised in a (liberal) Catholic tradition that emphasized the vital and necessary role of a person’s own conscience and a careful process of discernment in determining how to act on “divine inspiration,” always with an awareness that distinguishing the source of that inspiration can be nearly impossible. (But then again, I’m not sure if this is something that’s really common to Catholicism but not Protestantism, or if it’s something common to liberal Christianity rather than conservative Christianity, or if it’s just an accident that this was an emphasis in my childhood church and doesn’t actually represent a larger trend at all.)

Placing devotion to a deity in the context of personal discernment pretty much rules out for me any notion of handing over my will or submitting myself entirely to an external force. Not to mention — and maybe I am just not special enough to be on any god’s mailing list — I’m rarely on the receiving end of so obvious or direct a message from the gods that it includes how high I need to jump or which bridge I should be jumping from. My spiritual life is much more an on-going process of deep listening to a complex web of urges, attractions, distractions and repulsions, the various sources of which are just as often in the natural world around me or in my own psyche as in some externalized god-form (more often, I should say). I might sometimes talk about my relationship with my gods in terms of “messages” or guidance or inspiration, but it’s almost always metaphorical, not literal.

For Elani, and others, it seems like hubris to question the instructions of the gods. For me, it seems deeply arrogant to be too eager to attribute our various impulses to some external deity, to clothe our instincts or intuitions in the finery of divine inspiration as a way of elevating or ennobling them. It seems hubris to act on our assumptions that we are receiving and hearing such messages correctly, without first turning a very careful and critical eye on all of the ways our own desires, assumptions and projections might be biasing us.

Which is not to say that I don’t believe there is some transcendent divine reality that transcends not only our individual selves (and our Selves), but also our human and more-than-human/natural communities as well. But determining what influence that transcendent divinity has on our lives has, for me, always been an exercise in retrospective contemplation, where the patterns of coincidence and chance resolve into a coherent and beautiful melody even when, at the time, I was only ever bumbling along doing my best to tease out the signal from the noise.

I followed this up with a visit to Elani Temperance's blog, where I eventually succeeded (Google bugs not withstanding) to leave this comment on her post, "The girl who kicked the hornets nest (again), part 2":

I only just got home from traveling for the winter holidays visiting family, and so I was only just now able to catch up on John's post and all of these various replies. I wanted to say thanks for continuing the conversation. I wasn't familiar with your writing and John's brief quote was the first I'd heard of it -- I mention that, because I have some questions that I'd love to hear your thoughts on and, if you've already addressed them elsewhere in your prolific blog, even just a list of links of your past writing on the subject would be awesome. :)

Firstly, I was really struck by how you consistently equated a very specific kind of asymmetrical faith-based approach to religion with religion and/or organized tradition in general. B.T. touched on this already when he pointed out that it wasn't the religiousness of your approach that was threatening to him, but the more specific *kind* of faith you described. I was wondering if you could elaborate on why you don't think that other approaches (which may or may not include the kind of asymmetrical faith you have) are "religious" or "organized." You seem to suggest that traditions without asymmetrical relationship lack structure, cohesion, "solid community, shared gnosis, etc." For instance, right after quoting B.T.'s comment, you say:

"While I doubt that a more structured religious movement within Paganism will be the end of Paganism, I also think that the Traditions based upon religious commonalities will outlast the ones without them, simply because there is some 'glue' missing."

Because you seem to be equating "religion" with *your* particular approach to faith, it sounds a lot like you're saying that the only way to have an organized religious tradition is to place an asymmetrical relationship with the gods, in which the gods hold the power and authority, at the center of one's religious life. But it seems to me that we have many, many examples of long-lasting religious traditions that do not at all include your view of faith as inherently or necessarily asymmetrical. Is that what you meant to say, or have I misunderstood your point here?

Another point that intrigues me, that you didn't really get into in this post but that I'd love to hear more about, is the exact nature of how you listen to your gods. That is, how this asymmetrical relationship with them actually manifests for you. Your example of the synchronicity of the conversation with the masseuse is interesting, but it doesn't sound like anything different from the experiences someone might have if they had a more equal relationship with their god(s), or even someone who didn't believe in or have a relationship with any god(s) at all.

I left this comment on John's original post, and I'll reshare it here because I think it has some bearing:

"Maybe I'm just not special enough to be on any god’s mailing list — but I’m rarely on the receiving end of so obvious or direct a message from the gods that it includes how high I need to jump or which bridge I should be jumping from. My spiritual life is much more an on-going process of deep listening to a complex web of urges, attractions, distractions and repulsions, the various sources of which are just as often in the natural world around me or in my own psyche as in some externalized god-form. I might sometimes talk about my relationship with my gods in terms of “messages” or guidance or inspiration, but it’s almost always metaphorical, not literal.

It seems like for Elani, and others, it's hubris to question the instructions of the gods. For me, it seems deeply arrogant to be too eager to attribute our various impulses to some external deity, to clothe our instincts or intuitions in the finery of divine inspiration as a way of elevating or ennobling them. It seems hubris to act on our assumptions that we are receiving and hearing such messages correctly, without first turning a very careful and critical eye on all of the ways our own desires, assumptions and projections might be biasing us.

Which is not to say that I don’t believe there is some transcendent divine reality that transcends not only our individual selves, but also our human and more-than-human/natural communities as well. But determining what influence that transcendent divinity has on our lives has, for me, always been an exercise in retrospective contemplation, where the patterns of coincidence and chance resolve into a coherent and beautiful melody even when, at the time, I was only ever bumbling along doing my best to tease out the signal from the noise."

I guess my question for you is, how does an asymmetrical relationship with the gods help you to "tease out the signal from the noise"? If you believe that your deities really are real, external beings separate from yourself, then how do you guard against attributing your own desires and biases to them? In other words, how do you avoid making your gods "in your own image"? What process of discernment do you use to distinguish authentic communications from your deities from your own projections or sentimental imaginings? And what are those authentic communications actually like?

Sorry to bombard you with so many questions. I find this conversation really intriguing, and I hope you'll have a chance to explore some of these issues. Thanks for being willing to share and open yourself up to criticism.

I put emphasis on the part where I quote myself from the comment I left on John's post, in part because I think this is maybe the heart of the matter for me, and in part because the second version has been cleaned up a bit for the sake of clarity. For even more clarity, I ended up commenting again on John's original post after he replied to my first comment. In particular, John said:

While I do think there is a certain amount of over-confidence in polytheistic discourse, “hubris” and “arrogance” just do not seem like the right words to describe Elani’s practice. If you watch some of the videos she has posted of her practice, you will see that humility characterizes everything she does.

To which I responded:

Thanks for bringing this up -- I should have clarified more in my original comment, and I hope I didn't step on any toes by accident. "Hubris" may not be the right word for Elani's practice at all. Reading your brief quotes from her here was the first time I've encountered any of her writing, so I really didn't mean to judge her practice specifically (since I know pretty much nothing about it). Instead, I meant to offer my own definition of "hubris" in the religious sense, in the context of our definition of and relationship with deity. (In other words, "That's not a knife. This is a knife." ;))

I'm intrigued by the idea of "kharis" that Elani mentions -- it looks like this Greek word shares etymological roots with words like charity, charisma and even eucharist, all very potent words in various forms of Christianity and many of them directly related to the theological concept of grace. An emphasis on "kharis" as a kind of divine grace once again seems to put this approach to polytheism in line with more Protestant forms of Christianity, not to mention the charismatic forms of the Evangelicals in particular. I really appreciate the enthusiasm and celebratory aspect of Evangelicalism, though being an introvert myself and more inclined to personal moments of poesis, I think I'm naturally more drawn to mysticism than public charismatic movements. :)

All that said... I'm not sure merely a belief in divine grace is enough to justify submission, at least not to me. Why would anyone submit to a deity if they did not hold a belief in the goodness of that deity? It seems like that is not so much an explanation for the choice, as it is its most basic prerequisite. One could easily believe that the gods are benevolent without agreeing that this necessitates complete surrender to them. It seems like, instead, there has to be an accompanying belief that humans are as imperfect and flawed as the gods are benevolent and powerful, in order to explain why we must not merely enjoy but utterly submit to divine guidance.

I'm not particularly convinced by the argument that "willing submission" is really just another act of will. If it is, it is only in a very limited, truncated sense, it seems to me. Take, as a more mundane example, a marriage in which a wife agrees to "submit" to her husband. In practice, this might mean that she allows him to make all of the household and lifestyle decisions (and that when she makes decisions herself, she attempts to enact what she believes is his will, rather than her own). She may relie on his benevolence and love for her to guide him to take her into account when he makes those decisions. It may be that her belief in him is justified and he does his best to do right by her. It may be that she enters the marriage freely, and it might even be that she can leave any time she wishes through divorce. But none of those things change the fact that, within the context of the relationship, she does not act according to her own will but that of her husband's. In other words, she really only has one choice to make (whether or not to submit to her partner's will), and once she has made that choice, by the very nature of that choice she relinquishes her ability to make any others. I suppose that greatly simplifies life, to have only one real choice to make, but it's not the kind of simplicity that I find all that appealing, either in my personal relationships or in my spiritual ones. It's not a model I would strive to instantiate in my life.

I also do not think that this kind of submission is the same as, or the only way to express, mutual trust. Trust is most definitely an act of will. Submission seems to me to be, by definition, the relinquishment of will. "Willing submission" is, in that case, at best a description of a single specific act in which the will itself is abdicated; at worst, it is an oxymoron that only serves to confuse the issue.

But now I'm afraid I've hijacked your comment thread for my own musings! :) Thank you, as usual, for providing so much food for thought.

I have many more thoughts on this and will probably be adding another blog post here as a follow-up. In particular, I'm still very much grappling with the issue of discernment and the theological/spiritual concept of attending (in the sense of (a) deep listening, (b) full presence, (c) service -- all of which are practices which stretch and challenge the self to both transcend and deepen).

I think I am in some respects in a "dark night of the soul." But it is a dark night full of the sound of crickets. I am finding it difficult to listen not because I do not hear anything, but because the deeper I try to listen, the louder the cacophony seems to be, so that discerning some sense or meaning in it has become a challenge. This suggests to me that maybe there is an imbalance in the different ways that I approach the spiritual work of attending -- but that is a question for another blog post.

More on Reconstructionism as a Religious Methodology

Seren,

Thanks for your response! I was hoping someone with more "insider insight" would jump into the conversation. :) A lot of what you say makes sense and helps to put my impression of CR as an outsider to the community into some perspective. I think perhaps it's the lack of books written by CRs about what CRs "actually do," as you point out, that can sometimes leave those of us not immediately part of that community with the impression that a lot of CR is all talk and little actual living practice. (There's no reason why CR has to prove itself or make its practices available to people outside of the community, of course! I'm just saying that I wonder if that's one of the places where the confusion arises.)

I'm also interested in what the general principles for the CR approach are, exactly, and if there's somewhere where these are actually outlined and explored in detail. In the CR FAQ there are references here and there (usually when answering questions about who does or does not count as CR) to a community with a shared set of principles.... but I haven't been able to find a place where those principles are actually explained and clarified. You yourself mention how Rua's book "doesn't represent CR, and at times represents concepts and ideas that are antithetical to it." I haven't read the book, so it might be hard to answer this question: but I wonder if you'd be able to actually say what those concepts or ideas are that are antithetical to CR? Is it the methodology he uses, or the conclusions he comes to, or both?

The Fomorian issue is a good one of what I was talking about when I said that some of the criticisms seem to be theological rather than historical in nature. My own academic background is in comparative religious studies, and I've done field work that involved observation and interviews with people in various religious communities, as well as primary and secondary source research of historical traditions (for instance, I worked as a research assistant for a time with a professor studying the propagandist literature produced in Germany during the Protestant Reformation). In my experience in the field of comparative religious studies (and this may be different from the more historical/archeological approach), it is notoriously difficult to extrapolate theological concepts from cultural artifacts alone. Your review of Rua's book (thanks for the link!) goes into a bit more detail about why you think some of his conclusions are wrong and what evidence he doesn't take into account that you think he should have.... but it still seems to me that the question about whether or not the Fomorians are "evil"/adversarial or not is a theological question, and not something that can be definitively settled purely through academic examination of the remaining historical evidence. It may be that there were different opinions and approaches to that question even among the ancient Celts themselves. There is very often a distinction between the "official" view of a tradition's clergy or educated class, for instance, and that of the lay or working class, and in both cases some or even most of the evidence for these differences may be lost to time, with perhaps only the preserved "official" version or the wide-spread lay version surviving, or enough of both surviving as to leave us with only a vague and seemingly contradictory view. Sometimes the very same cultural artifacts (like sacred texts, ritual objects, designated sacred temples or spaces, etc.) were interpreted in vastly different ways by different members of the same religious community. And this makes drawing conclusions about the specific theologies of religious communities that are no longer accessible or able to speak for themselves often extremely difficult.

I'm inclined to agree with the idea that viewing the Fomorians as "evil" is a simplified and probably inaccurate view.... but that's in part because of my own contemporary liberal tendencies towards inclusivity and tolerance (you could even accuse me of being a bit P.C.) that makes the concept of "evil" in general distasteful and not very creditable to me. I'm completely willing to admit that I have no way of definitively proving if my ancestors held that same view, and they very well may not have. It is possible, after all, that even without taking all of the evidence into account, Rua may have inadvertently come to the correct conclusion. My impression is that the legacy of modern historical research is actually full of that kind of thing happening, while historians with very sound methodology can still end up with the conclusions that were in retrospect wrong or biased in some way.

Which again brings me back to the question of what exactly are the shared principles or approaches that CR uses? I've read through the CR FAQ and nothing there is all that different from the approach that I take - but clearly, I find my own balance of scholarly research, community feedback and personal interpretive and experiential engagement. (I am definitely not just haphazardly throwing together whatever bits and pieces I happen to like, which seems to be CR's biggest beef with non-reconstructionist folks.) To what extent, in your experience, does the CR criticism of non-CR approaches depend more on the conclusions that are reached than on the actual method of reaching them? I'm not so much saying that CR seems restrictive - but that it seems [i]selective[/i] in a very specific way. And I'm interested in what actually guides or informs that specific way of being selective.

(One example, for instance, is the very idea that the starting point is the question, "how did they [our ancestors] do it?" [i]Why[/i] is that the starting point? What assumptions about the the concept of authenticity itself underlie the belief that ancient cultural traditions are more authentic than modern ones, or that academic scholarship is more authentic than UPG? You have to start somewhere, sure, but I'm really curious about the reasons for starting there in particular. My guess is that trying to thoroughly answer that question will give more insight into the more subtle, less conscious ways in which CRs balance methodology, UPG and community-identity.)

Again, sorry this is so long! Thanks for indulging me with all my questions! :)

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Sunflower,

Thanks for these links! I've now spent a good hour reading through a bunch of these old threads - with the result that I feel like maybe I'm being a bit redundant. ;) A lot of the points that Catja brings up really hit the nail on the head as far as what I'm trying to get at. I'm not at all a professional scholar like she is, but my experience in academia pretty much jives with her experience: that (a) modern scholarship thrives on "the gaps" which open up new possibilities for exploration and study, (b) a working, living religion will inevitably have to make certain leaps in order to overcome such gaps, and so (c) modern research is not the same process as reconstructing a religion, and you're going to run into contradictions and conflicts if you try to make them the same. Since my academic background is actually in the comparative study of religions, I tend to like to poke at "the gap" represented by point (c) in CR and other Recon communities because the scholar in me is like, "Oooh! Unexamined assumptions that guide the evolution of a unique religious community! Fetch me my research poking stick!" Which I guess can make me seem kind of obnoxious. :-/ But really it's just because I'm really fascinated by those questions and, regardless of what my own spiritual tradition is, I really enjoy finding out what other religious communities do and why.

Seren is taking the brunt of my questions right now, unfortunately, because I tend to bombard the people who will tolerate my questioning with demands that they explain all those other people who won't. ;) But like I said, I hope I'm not being too clumsy or hurtful in my enthusiasm.

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Finn,

That may well be, and I definitely didn't mean to imply that CRs don't ever have authentic relationships with deities. I guess I was just saying that, for me personally anyway, it would be a real stumbling block to have to constantly worry about how my relationship with deity measured up against the expectations of the community and the standards of academic research, especially when both of those tend to be moving targets a lot of the time. Perhaps this is actually why CRs tend to be quieter and more careful about sharing their personal practice? And maybe a few folks (like Erynn Rowan Laurie, f'ex) being a bit bolder and willing to share would help mitigate the misconception and even alleviate some of that anxiety? It's a delicate subject, and very personal, though, so....


I think you're probably right about the role that the clergy (in this case, the Druids) played in establishing and maintaining a structured religious tradition in ancient Celtic societies - though, like I mentioned to Seren above, there is almost always also some discrepancies and differences of opinion between a community's educated class and its lay/working class. My point is more that, even with the Druids acting as a class of informed tradition-keepers who built up a collective body of practice and theology (or at least, theology to the extent that they did) - this is still very different from the way modern academics approach historical/scholarly research today. Very different. Sunflower's links to Catja's stuff above says it way better than I could, though, but that's basically my point.

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Darkhawk,

I think this is a really good point - and that your footnote is also right on track. I think it's also important to remember, when striving to be "scholarly" in one's approach, that actual academics go through 3 - 7+ years of additional training and education above and beyond undergrad in order to be accepted members of the academic community. Much of that additional study is learning the processes (and limits) of the academic community itself. For that reason alone, academic work is not [i]really[/i] available to absolutely everyone - there is always going to be a lot of reliance by non-academics (even in, or especially in, Recon) on what academics are able to make available to the general public in ways that can be readily and widely understood, let alone practically applied to reconstructing a religion.

But depending too much on the divine inspiration of those who have a god-phone is a big problem, you're absolutely right. It's the other extreme that you can too easily swing towards. One of the original draws for me about Paganism was that it put a good deal of emphasis on making the tools available to anyone and everyone to kind of "build your own god-phone" (to overstretch the metaphor ;)) - in other words, to give you the tools and practices to help you cultivate a direct relationship with the divine for yourself. I'm of the belief that this is something anyone can do, and that there aren't just chosen individuals who have a better connection to the divine than others.... But it is, like academic work, something that requires a certain degree of training, practice and on-going commitment. For that reason, it doesn't [i]really[/i] avoid the same problem as the scholarly approach. There is the same caveat to divine inspiration as there is for academic work - in theory it can be available to anyone, but in practice not everyone will be willing or able to make the necessary commitment.



This is one reason that I really dislike the term "UPG" and how it's used, and tend to avoid using it myself if I can. I like to refer to a person's "interpretive and experiential engagement" instead. Why? Because there is really no such thing as an entirely individualized, private "UPG." All interpretations and experiences are interpretations or experiences [i]of[/i] something - and they are always influenced in one way or another by the socio-cultural contexts of the people having the experience or making the interpretation. That is why it is an interpretive or experiential [i]engagement[/i] - a person is engaging with something else, either a deity, a landscape, a human community, a cultural symbol, or some combination of these things or any number of others. An experience or interpretation might be more or less unique to that individual, but it is never entirely and purely solitary.

So the distinction between UPG as private or solitary, and academic/scholarly work as the primary corroborative approach to developing a shared community understanding is, I think, a false one. There are many, many ways in which communities can build a shared spiritual tradition that does not rely on or borrow from the methods and processes of academia. I bristle a bit when Recons/CRs talk about UPG as though it were entirely private and solitary in distinction from the community approach of academic scholarship. To me, this seems to ignore the fact that an individual's interpretive framework of their experiences is always going to be shaped by their membership in one or more communities, and so the way they integrate and understand these moments of personal "gnosis," inspiration or imagination cannot be entirely separated from the cultural or communal contexts they belong to.

Rather, I think it's more likely that those moments designated as "UPG" just tend to be more deeply influenced by modern culture than by the ancient pre-Christian cultures that the Recons/CRs are striving to reconstruct. When a person has a sudden inspiration about how modern physics and Jungian psychology (both modern, scientifically-grounded theories)might work together to explain a dream they had recently, it's called UPG. When a person has a sudden insight into how the connection between two pieces of archeological evidence help to explain the meaning of some ancient text (which may itself have been a poem or dream recorded by some long-dead priest), it's called research. The difference is in the relative value that the Recon/CR community places on the cultural artifacts and perspectives involved.

That said, I don't have much experience with non-CR Recons, and only a little bit of experience of CR at that. But I totally agree that CRs, IMLE, tend to be the most UPG/mysticism-friendly of the Recon communities.

Authority and Relationship in CR

Part of my reply to a conversation on TC about different Celtic traditions:

I guess that's where I start to feel uncomfortable with CR. My understanding is that folks in CR approach Celtic Reconstructionism as first and foremost based upon academic/scholarly work, turning to UPG only to "fill in the gaps" that scholarship can't. This reminds me a lot of the "god of the gaps" approach to monotheism that has caused so much trouble among modern Abrahamic religions when faced with the conflicting authority of "inspired" sacred texts and scientific knowledge - except in this case, CR comes down firmly on the other side of that divide. What's ironic is that in both cases, each religious community comes down in favor of external authority. The CR approach says it is better to trust the external authority of careful and objective scholarship and research than the personal interpretive and experiential engagement that they call "UPG" - and the literalist/fundamentalist monotheists say it is better to trust the external authority of ancient sacred texts as the "word of God" than the attempts of science and scholarship as merely human (and therefore flawed) endeavors to discover truth. But in both cases, the emphasis is on finding a trustworthy external authority (the only difference is how "trustworthy" and "external" are defined).

Maybe it's my own streak of stubbornness - but I'm not keen on religions that emphasize external authority over personal relationship. I much prefer spiritual traditions that emphasize the difficult but necessary work of balancing and, when possible, reconciling the two. One consequence of the CR approach, for instance, is that while it tends to emphasize a "hard polytheism" that views the gods as real, distinct beings - it also undermines the CR practitioner's ability to engage authentically with them in the present, since he or she is expected to ignore or at least distrust any insight about or experience of them that contradicts the external authority of current academic scholarship. To me, that seems a bit like trying to be friends with someone while constantly comparing what they say and do against their high school report cards and SAT scores. Sure, that kind of information can give you insight into who they were and who they've become (and it provides an "objective," standardized measure that I guess would be helpful in catching a perpetrator of identity theft), but it seems an odd way to try to cultivate a relationship in the here and now. And what's especially weird to me is that the ancient Celts did not even have a concept of "objective scholarly research" - so the very attitude that such research should take precedence over "UPG" is pretty much by definition not part of the worldview of ancient Celtic tradition.

I think CR folks would respond (and have responded) that Celtic Reconstructionism is inherently a modern phenomenon and so obviously it will be influenced and shaped by the knowledge and culture of modern Western society. That's great, as far as it goes, but it's basically another way of saying that they feel comfortable picking and choosing the ways in which they strive to emulate ancient Celtic cultures. That's something we all have to do, in the end, if we want to have any kind of Celtic-inspired spiritual practice today. It's the unspoken, unacknowledged assumptions that underlie the process of picking and choosing that make me uncomfortable.