The Curve of the Sacred: An Exploration of Human Spirituality

THE CURVE OF THE SACRED An Exploration of Human Spirituality VIBS Volume 178 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Peter A...

Author: Constantin V. Ponomareff; Kenneth A. Bryson

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED An Exploration of Human Spirituality

VIBS Volume 178 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Peter A. Redpath Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno Mary-Rose Barral Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Harvey Cormier Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon William Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling

Matti Häyry Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy Alan Milchman Alan Rosenberg Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Anne Waters John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Philosophy and Religion PAR Kenneth A. Bryson, Editor

THE CURVE OF THE SACRED An Exploration of Human Spirituality

Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-10: 90-420-2031-8 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2031-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

DEDICATION To our spouses with love and affection Barbara Ponomareff and Rosalie M. Bryson

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Philosophy and Religion PAR

Kenneth A. Bryson Editor Editorial Board of PAR Rod Nicholls (webmaster) Deane-Peter Baker D. de Leonardo Castro Elijah G. Dann Russ Dumke Carl Kalwaitis Michael Sudduth Gregory MacLeod

Harriet E. Barber Stephen Clark Gwen Griffith-Dickson Jim Kanaris John C. Duncan Pawel Kawalec Esther McIntosh Ludwig Nagl

Other Titles in PAR Rem B. Edwards. What Caused the Big Bang? 2001. VIBS 115 Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell, Editors, Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. 2003. VIBS 143


CONTENTS Editorial Foreword by Kenneth A. Bryson

xi

Foreword by Rose Tekel

xiii

Acknowledgments

xvii

Introduction by Kenneth A. Bryson Part One: Spirituality from the Perspective of the Humanities Tradition Constantin V. Ponomareff

1

5

ONE

The Sacred and Evil

7

TWO

Healers and Would-Be Healers

15

THREE

The Koran’s Compassionate Spirit

21

FOUR

Transformations of the Sacred in Russian Society

23

FIVE

Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain

27

SIX

T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

31

SEVEN

Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum: The Sacred in Destructive Guise

37

EIGHT

A Meditation on Albert Camus

41

NINE

The Sacred as Subatomic Particle, Image, Subliminal Intelligence or Metaphor

45

TEN

Albert Einstein

51

ELEVEN

Edvard Munch’s Madonna

57

TWELVE

Jung’s Unconscious

61

THIRTEEN

The Sacred and Time

65

THE CURVE OF THE SACRED

x

Part Two: Becoming Personal from the Spiritual Kenneth A. Bryson

69

FOURTEEN

The Nature of Spirituality

71

FIFTEEN

Acting towards the Divine Image

93

SIXTEEN

The Spiritual Nature of Dependency

115

SEVENTEEN

Recovery as Process

131

EIGHTEEN

Spirituality and Human Death

151

NINETEEN

Spirituality and Religion

161

Notes

169

Bibliography

183

About the Authors

195

Index

197

EDITORIAL FOREWORD Constantin Ponomareff suggested the title The Curve of the Sacred. It provides a rich metaphor to express the varied ways of spirituality. We can draw a tangent from any point along the circumference of a spiritual curve to connect with human activity. Being spiritual is a factual activity of reason more than a normative mind set. Intrinsic to human design is the tendency to wonder about the meaning of life. While the spiritual tendency underlies the quest for meaning, religion provides some of our most cherished answers to that question. The Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion (PAR) is dedicated to a rigorous examination of religious issues. The forms of religious expression include the totality of human experience of the sacred. The scope of philosophy and religion is holistic and comprehensive: holistic since it includes all forms of religious expressions and comprehensive since it views religious expression within a wide range of values. Since the spiritual tendency finds expression as art, music, literature, and religion, the effort to disengage how it works proves useful to the goal envisaged by PAR. The book is written in two complementary voices. Part One (chapters 1– 13) views spirituality from the perspective of the humanities tradition. Part Two (chapters 14–19) examines how being spiritual allows us to become more truly personal. Kenneth A. Bryson Editor PAR special series Value Inquiry Book Series


FOREWORD How do we know that we are in the presence of the sacred? This question has occupied religious thinkers and thinkers about religion for thousands of years. Until recently, those discussions have taken place within the context that the sacred is real; that while it may require extraordinary circumstances to “know” the sacred, few would have disputed the existence of a Being greater than ourselves. As both authors point out, many people today doubt the existence of the sacred. Still others are merely indifferent to the possibility. This book represents the work of two authors who have taken different paths to come to the same conclusion: the sacred is still a significant part of the lives of people in the modern world. In order to reach this conclusion, both authors have also grappled with the similarities and differences between spirituality and religion, acknowledging that either can serve as a positive or negative force in human lives. Both authors claim that we need to have a relationship with the sacred in order to achieve a deeper sense of ourselves as part of a unity. That unity encompasses our sense of the self as it relates to our bodies, our social world, our environment and the metaphysical realm. Both authors also work within the framework of spirituality and healing, making the argument that the appreciation of the sacred can promote the process of achieving inner balance between our emotions and our intellect, and help us heal when that inner balance has been disrupted. When we open ourselves to the possibility of the sacred, both authors argue, we can find sources of hope to our despair that may be caused by political, cultural, or personal problems. The driving passion for the authors is to demonstrate that the sacred has both a presence and a healing power in our society, and that we need to be open to that reality. The reason that we so often are unable to recognize the existence of the sacred is because we have accepted the argument that science and technology are the hallmark of modern thought and both negate the possibility of the sacred. The arguments in this volume present the point of view that science and technology cannot take the place of the sacred, although they can co-exist with the sacred. The two authors approach their arguments from different disciplines and employ different material in their discourse. Constantin Ponomareff brings to our attention great works of literature, music and art as examples of artists who have recognized that “in this existential experience of our spirituality, we may finally come to a deeper and humbler understanding of our place in the universe.” Precisely through works of art can we truly appreciate the way in which the sacred functions in our lives. In my view, Ponomareff bases his discussion of art and the sacred on Jungian psychology, and in particular, Carl Gustav Jung’s notion that we can

xiv


only know the sacred through our unconscious. Our experience of the sacred, according to Jung, is not primarily intellectual, but based on the experience of the sacred. In order to be able to have that experience we must be open to ways of knowing that involve something other than intellectual pursuits. Our experience of the sacred comes from our inner self, reaching for an expression of something greater than itself. That expression of the inner self moving toward the sacred is independent of beliefs. We can say that one does not believe in the sacred, and yet in expressions of one’s inner self such as a novel, or a painting or a musical composition, that longing that the inner self has for an expression of the sacred will manifest itself. This is, I believe, the central point of Ponomareff’s essay. He then suggests that many artists have followed the ideas of Friedrich Schiller that the artist: as an intermediary between an otherworldly reality and human existence, could access a spiritual source of being with which to transform a flawed humanity through the moral power of his art. Writers and poets, who took it upon themselves to help remedy social ills, have ever since owed a debt to this romantic tradition of writing and have, in this sense, always acted as potential healers. We have needed healers in our society as we deal with the effects of historical events and social changes, which have left us with profound wounds to our sense of self. Artists can express those wounds through poetry, novels, paintings and music, and point us toward the path of linkage with nature and the universe. Science gives us the tools to understand nature and the universe, but it does it by analyzing the component parts. Artists bring us to the creation of connections between the universe and us. As Kenneth A. Bryson explains in the second part of this volume, the idea of a self separate from the universe including other selves negates the possibility of spirituality and the relationship with the sacred. While Bryson’s approach is deeply rooted in the philosophical and theological tradition of Western Christianity, and Ponomareff is writing as a scholar of comparative literature, they share the same assumptions of the relationship of the self to society, to epistemological activity and to the sacred. I believe that Bryson states it most plainly in the following passage: Third, the spiritual is manifest in the activities taking place in the central-self. The central-self is the locus of all thoughts, feelings, acts of reason and judgment, conscious and unconscious processes alike. The central-self is the place where social relationships and environmental relationships are processed. The essential feature of the central-self is that it does not exist outside these processes. The relationships that constitute the central-self provide the metaphysical foundation for the existence of

Foreword

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self or personal identity. The construction of a self is an epistemological action . . . . Human nature, personhood, and spirituality are related concepts. Given this understanding shared by both authors of the relationship between the self and spirituality, it follows that Ponomareff concentrates on the healing qualities of the arts. The healing is directed toward the self that has been severed from its roots in the universe. The self can no longer touch “the curve of the sacred” in its attempts to deal with the evil, sorrow and disappointment that life inevitably brings. Ponomareff indicates that great artists feel this rupture in our society more profoundly than most other people do. They also have the passion and the vision to both express the loss of unity and the path to harmony. In his discussions of the work of T. S. Eliot, Albert Camus, and other artists, Ponomareff directs our attention to the relationship between the sacred and the arts, even when the artist feels troubled by the link of self, unity and the Sacred. Ponomareff and Bryson both deal with the realm of science and scientists, and show that living within the scientific world and still be fully cognoscente and open to the realm of spirituality is possible. Both authors also fully recognize and acknowledge that the same kinds of processes of the relationship between the sacred and the self are found in the religions of the East: All three major Abraham religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism—are based on God’s invitation to enter into personal relationship with Him. The positive response to the invitation provides an indubitable argument for a positive connection with the spiritual. The study of these connections makes evident, not only how the spiritual tendency works, but manifests how the rituals and symbols of Abraham religions feed our spiritual engine. The connection with the spiritual is no less evident in Eastern religions. The relationship between religion or religions and spirituality has been one of energetic debate within the field of Religious Studies. Bryson addresses this issue in terms of religions as means of connection; religions all connect us in different ways through rituals and ceremonies to the sacred. “While the rituals and ceremony that guide the shift towards the All, God, or Being are culturally based, east and west come together in their use of religion as religare or principle of connection.” While both authors discuss how re-connecting to the sacred can bring about healing for the individual, Bryson deals in detail with a situation where healing is crucial; namely the healing from alcohol addiction. Bryson discusses the different models used to deal with the causes of addiction and a variety of treatment models. His point in this part of the book is to demonstrate that while scientific, medical research has much to offer, that true heal-

xvi


ing can best be achieved when the individual recognizes that in order to overcome addiction, an individual must also touch “the curve of the sacred.” This book deals with the ways in which the sacred manifests itself in our lives in a cultural and individual level. It does so, both authors argue, not only on an intellectual level, but also through the recognition of the depth and spiritual hunger of the self. That recognition may only come about when we are in despair, as Camus or the addict. Yet even in times when we see nothing other than the abyss “the curve of the sacred,” the authors contend, can cross our path. This volume represents the processes whereby we can recognize the hope that the sacred can bring to our lives.

Rose Tekel Religious Studies Cape Breton University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Chapter 15, “Acting towards the Divine Image” was first published as “An Interpretation of Genesis 1:26,” Philosophy and Theology, 17:1 (Fall 2005). My thanks for permission to use it here. The excerpt from the book Alcoholics Anonymous, pages 83–84 has been reprinted with permission of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (A.A.W.S.) Permission to use this excerpt does not mean that A.A. has reviewed or approved the contents of this publication, or that A.A. necessarily agrees with the views expressed herein. A.A. is a program of recovery from alcoholism only—use of this material in connection with programs and activities patterned after A.A., but which address other problems or concerns, or any other non-A.A. context, does not imply otherwise. Short quotations and reference in this volume should fall within the “fair use” policy. Thanks to Daeton and Jamie MacRury, and to Alana MacIsaac for assisting with proofreading chores. Our motto is “Let no typo occupy sacred space.” Special thanks to Elizabeth D. Boepple, VIBS Professional Preparer, for raising this manuscript to the high degree of stylistics professionalism exacted by VIBS.

Modeh ani l’fanekha melekh chai v’kayom . . .


INTRODUCTION Kenneth A. Bryson The Curve of the Sacred is a metaphor for spirituality in action. While definitions and descriptions of spirituality abound—perhaps because the term spiritual is confused with the intangible aspects of life—I take it to be a loving tendency towards the Sacred (God, Higher Power, or Power greater than self.) Spirituality is an innate energy that drives us to enter into relationship with something greater than ourselves. It feeds the great works of art and literature, and major world religions. Religion is much narrower than spirituality since it provides objective parameters for the encounter. Religion is authentic and spiritually based if its metaphors and symbols open a road for the Almighty to enter into communion with us. Some religious claims are self-serving, and are inauthentic as they generate an image of God in the likeness of the human condition. Religion as illusion is the expression of a materialist culture. The same spiritual energy that leads to the discovery of a Higher Power leads to the denial of God. Which result obtains is contingent on whether the spiritual tendency moves out of love, or is self-serving. All three major Abraham religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism—are based on God’s invitation to enter into personal relationships with Him. The positive response to the invitation provides an indubitable argument for a positive connection with the spiritual. The study of these connections not only makes evident how the spiritual tendency works, but also manifests how the rituals and symbols of Abraham religions feed our spiritual engine. The connection with the spiritual is no less evident in Eastern religions. Buddhism expresses the belief that suffering arises out of selfishness or clinging to self. The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path teach how to end suffering, and the cycle of rebirth. Moving away from self towards the All of existence achieves spiritual enlightenment. The rituals and ceremony that guide the shift towards the All, or God of Being, are culturally based; east and west come together in their use of religion as religare or principle of connection. The cultural sets that shape the spiritual tendency are not limited to the religious connection. The evidence of Russian literature, romantic poetry, music, art, dance, story telling, acupuncture, meditation, massage, and aromatherapy provide instances of spirituality in action. In medicine, especially since 1985 in the West but much earlier in the East, healing plays a central role in wellness. Spiritual healing takes place at the level of a mind-body connection, while curing is for the body or the person as an organism. Medicine restores the physiological integrity of an organism. Holistic healing includes a focus on persons as dynamic unit of mind and body. The holistic dimension of medicine is more apparent in the east than in the west. The Western world is in love with technology. Neil Postman calls

2


attention to the dangers of being enamored with technological fixes, saying, “The operation or therapy was successful but the patient died.”1 Over the past twenty years, the medical focus has broadened to include healing, as is evident in palliative and supportive care, nursing programs, and medical school programs at Canadian and American Universities. The spiritual tendency animates the quest for meaning. Good and evil drive the search for meaning. Satan and Jesus Christ are spirits. To suggest that a loving tendency drives us to do good, while a desire for evil leads us to harm other persons and the environment, is reasonable. If human beings are intrinsically good, then doing well generates positive emotions. Not doing well generates negative emotions such as hatred of others (crime, violence), poor self-image, and pollution of the environment. Pollution provides a striking instance of a serious disconnection between the loving tendencies of spirituality and the planet. Recent efforts towards sustainable developments first introduced by the Club of Rome in the early 1970s, the appearance of the Bruntland Commission Report in 1987, the Rio Accord of 1992, and current world summits study the face of pollution as manifestations of economic, health, and social agendas driven by greed and disregard of the environment. The developments that arise out of a soured spirituality are not sustainable precisely because they are disempowering the environment and all living things. The distinction between being persons and being human is central to the study of spirituality. It lends itself to an interdisciplinary tracing of how spirituality manifests itself in literature, medicine, theology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. While all members of our species are born human, we are not equally personal. The distinction between being a human being and being a person avoids the abstract, elusive, quest to discern what exactly human structure is. The analysis of the nature, origin, and range of the spiritual makes more sense through the study of the processes that generate this structure. Structure is the product of underlying processes. If the structure of human nature as “I,” “self,” “ego,” or “subject” of experience is opaque, we can get at spirituality by another route. We can examine the road to spirituality through a study of the processes that make us human. The processes that generate the human structure take place at three fundamental levels of existence. The first of these associations or processes I call the environmental-self. We are the output of genetic associations taking place in a formative biological environment. The ambitious project to map the human genome takes this a step further by providing a detailed map of all our genetic associations. Genomic medicine will transform health care as we learn the genetic configuration of disease and block the proteins that lead to diseases like cancer and stroke. The future looks bright as we move from symptom management to the elimination of contributing factors through causal analysis. Our adding healthy lifestyle choices to the health mix strengthens the success of genomic medicine.

Introduction

3

Second, we are the output of associations taking place at the level of a social-self. We need people to be what we are. I am suggesting the use of a “we are therefore I am” concept of self to replace the Cartesian dream, or illusion that an independent, separate self, exists. This means that spirituality lives on the arms of a person-making process instead of in the empty recesses of a walled in subject. The benefits are direct as we look to associations taking place in the face of other human beings, and in the state of the forest to see spirituality in action. Third, the spiritual is manifest in the activities taking place in the central-self. The central-self is the locus of all thoughts, feelings, and reasoning and judgment, including both conscious and unconscious processes. The central-self is the place where social relationships and environmental relationships are processed. The essential feature of the central-self is that it does not exist outside these processes. The relationships that constitute the central-self provide the metaphysical foundation for the existence of self or personal identity. The construction of a self is an epistemological action. The attempt to conduct an investigation into the nature of spirituality from the point of view of processes stands in sharp contrast to the view of self as subject of activity. The effort of René Descartes makes evident the deficiencies of person as self or subject of experiences. Descartes opens his philosophy of self the same way Euclid opens his geometry—with an intuited thought as opposed to the processes that generate interiority. While Descartes cleverly applies his mathematical formula—analysis and synthesis from algebra, intuition, and deduction from geometry—to the Meditations, the disconnection between mind and body serves notice that something is terribly wrong with the method. Descartes found something when he looked into the cogito, but what he saw there was an activity of reason, not the processes or elements of experience that convey being to consciousness. He substituted mind flapping for the being of things. We avoid his error by centering the first operation of knowledge on the primacy of being. What do person-making processes teach us about spirituality? The processes enable us to trace the development of a spiritual connection in action. They provide geography of spirituality or intelligence about how connections that generate meaning animate spirituality. The person-making process allows us to fix the locus of meaning in the story of a human life. It sets the stage for a process of spiritual welding as illness, disease, and significant losses can subvert the meaning of life. The act of spiritual welding is a process whereby fresh meaning is soldered on the arms of becoming more truly personal. The fresh meaning is often required to replace meaning lost because of necessary losses (grief, aging, illness, disease, divorce) and the negative emotions that arise out of not dealing with the pain of grief. From the point of view of metaphysics, a negative emotion arises as the spiritual tendency meets a destructive association,

4


while forming healthy associations on the arms of the person-making process generate positive emotions. A destructive association promotes disunity between mind and body. Environmental pollution, addiction, war, and other forms of violence provide instances of that disunity. The Curve of the Sacred tells a story of the genealogy of spirituality in action in good times and in bad times. Part One opens with a study of spirituality through a review of the psychological principles that accompany the production of great works of art and literature. Part Two follows the development of spirituality in medicine, theology, psychology, philosophy, and religion.

Part One SPIRITUALITY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE HUMANITIES TRADITION Constantin V. Ponomareff The twisting of a familiar theme into a new shape is sometimes more revealing and ultimately more significant than acquiring new knowledge and a new set of principles. Often when imagination twists the commonplace into a slightly new form, suddenly we see soul where formerly it was hidden. Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul


One THE SACRED AND EVIL When the Lord saw that man had done much evil on earth and that his thoughts were always evil, he was sorry that he had made man on earth, and he was grieved at heart. Genesis 6:5–6 We have just lived through one of the darkest centuries in human history. Spiritually we have paid a heavy price. Our ideals of humanity and culture have been undermined which, in turn, has triggered doubt in us, in goodness and progress, in God, in our belief that such a thing as cosmic structure exists, and that the universe is moved by an innate constructive goal. As a result, a sense that we are orphans in space and time gnaws at us. In this chapter, I suggest that we have a continuing and permanent kinship with the Sacred, which is the source of universal good. Our vicious and brutal historical experience shows us that we have lost touch with the Sacred and that we are responsible for the evil we have let loose upon the world. We have peopled the spiritual realm with all manner of religious figures to suit our historical and institutionalized needs, and, by so doing, we have fictionalized the sacred impulse in being. In substituting our intellectual imaginings for an intuitive consciousness, we have created a fundamental imbalance in our selves. Beyond the fictionalizations of our ideals, whether in the religious or political realms, the Sacred remains a universal force and healing energy. We are responsible to connect again to the feeling part of our being which our contemporary scientific and materialistic civilization has neglected. This would help us re-establish our lost inner balance and protect us from either intellectual or emotional extremes, which prevent us from experiencing life with greater unbiased openness. This openness to being and to life, to nature, and to the universe allows us to reconnect to our human and our cosmic being. For as long as we can avoid systematizing and institutionalizing this experience of the sacred connection, we can regain our sense of belonging to the universe, whether we do it through philosophical wonder, through scientific exploration, or through other kinds of spiritual and artistic endeavor. The small—ourselves included—carries such a cosmic sweep. We may wish to capture this sweep in music or painting, in poetry or literature, in religion, in science or psychology, or in some other imaginative configuration

8


of the mind and spirit, or absorb it like a heavenly balm into ourselves. The solace and joy that these experiences of the Sacred bring, and with them the feeling of healing and of being healed, is perhaps all the wisdom of which we are capable and is perhaps the only truth for which living is worth. The therapeutic nature of the sacred impulse suggests a universal compassionate force at work in human existence. The spiritual reality of this experience also suggests that both a meaningful continuity in human life and an eternal perspective to man’s journey through time exist. As we will see in the following pages, we have some proof of this in a variety of historical, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual experiences that gives us back the sense of being a part in an infinite chain of being. Though the source of the Sacred may be eons away, the Sacred is always close at hand, in life and death, and especially where pain, suffering, and stress exist. The curve of the Sacred reaches into all walks of life. I cannot agree with Ecclesiastes that all is emptiness and chasing the wind, or with William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Prospero for whom: We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Our human existence has more substance than Shakespeare’s insubstantial pageant might suggest. The fleeting beauty of life carries an immortal spark within it. Whenever the curve of the Sacred touches us, we feel that, for all our shortcomings, we are not alone, but a part of a spiritual universe that imbues our being and reaches far beyond our ken. If too much mind often deceives or confuses us, perhaps we belong to this feeling, this intuition of a spiritual universe, which gives us the strength to confront our mortality and, in spite of it, to continue to live into an unknown future, generation after generation. Perhaps this inner knowledge allows us to be stoic in the face of the inevitable. Albert Camus (1913–1960) often spoke of this sort of courage. We also put a humility and trust against the inevitability of human fate. An inner knowledge lets us enjoy what we have been given. Most important, when we experience the spiritual universe, the universal life energy as love in its many guises, we can continue to go on and stay the course in our cosmic journey. In this “best of all possible worlds,” with such a traumatic history of evil, that we are still capable of being open to sacred universal impulses is a wonder. The global reach of the world’s religions speaks eloquently about the degree to which our human race is, in one form or another, aware of and in touch with the sacred dimension. Out of a total population of over six billion, roughly five billion are (officially) religious believers.1 Such widespread religious expression, even when institutionalized, is highly suggestive of both our spiritual intuition and our need for some sacred experience in our lives. I hold

The Sacred and Evil

9

that if the sacred impulse is so widespread on earth, we should not be too surprised to find it expressed in more secular form in humanitarian organizations such as the United Nations with its focus on famine relief, genocide intervention, and peace-keeping. Other such international agencies include Médecins sans Frontières, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Oxfam, Amnesty International and other cultural and religious organizations at the local or global levels. For all its flaws, the computerized modern technology that has come into being enables the force of the sacred and humane to be globally effective in a variety of social, economic, financial and industrial forms. Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in our awareness of the earth as a unit and in our sense of human togetherness is the satellite perspective of earth from outer space, and the ecumenical movement among Christian churches and the New Age consciousness. The Sacred is at work furthering global communication—not always used by man for benign purposes—and breaking down barriers that have prevented humankind from moving spiritually and physically closer together. I hope that one day, perhaps in the not too distant future, men and women, especially our children, will finally be able to participate to a much greater extent than at present in the feeling of the common sacred denominator of human existence. The Sacred has always been there, even before historical records. The world’s religions and their secular fallout is but a small part of human spiritual history. As Huston Smith (1919–) tells us, the institutionalized religious impulse is only a few thousand years old, whereas the primal experience of the sacred is much, much older: The historical religions now pretty much blanket the earth, but chronologically they form only the tip of the religious iceberg; for they span less than four thousand years as compared with the three million years or so of the religions that preceded them.2 Smith speaks of the Australian aboriginal experience as an instance of primal religions. He stresses their “capacity to sense the sacred” in nature and to keep that sense alive through their myths and sacred art in a world that to them has always been timeless and where “everything is, in its way religious”3 Anthropologist David Turner (1941–), after thirty years in the field with Australian Aborigines, came to similar conclusions about their religious instinct. He found a profound spirituality among these people, which enabled them, he says, to see, to hear, and to experience a spiritual presence in nature. Their inner awareness of the sacred dimension in human existence has shaped them to lead a compassionate and selfless way of life based on what he calls “renunciation,” a kind of pure social sharing, without any expectation of either material or spiritual returns.4 Such a global reach of the Sacred over eons cannot be an accident. Even though we cannot know its ultimate purpose, we

10


can make some inferences as to that purpose based on its compassionate and curative tendency. Maintaining my vantage point that the sacred manifests itself as a universal compassionate and healing force in the face of so much evil in our world might appear contradictory. Consequently, if we speak of a compassionate life force or, as the case may be, of a loving God, we have to take account of the potential for evil in human beings. The Christian church has tried to resolve this problem of evil in man by seeing it as a consequence of his mythical paradisaic fall from divine grace and the resulting innate sinfulness, or original sin, of humankind. Zoroastrianism, on the other hand, ultimately suggests that both good and evil have their source in the divine. Other Eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, are less focused on man’s sinfulness than on his faculty for liberation from human suffering through meditative and mystic means that lead to progressive spiritual development. Such a spiritual focus—in a more secular sense similar to Confucian social concern—brings the Eastern religious mind closer to my sense of the sacred alleviation of human pain and suffering. I have difficulty accepting the notion that the Sacred is in any way responsible for the evil that men and women do. Though we have ascribed our human features to God, we cannot ascribe our evil deeds to Him. Elie Wiesel (1928–), who survived the Nazi concentration camps, said: Evil is in the world. The question is why innocent people are punished. No answers exist. I won’t accept comfortable answers. If anyone would say there is an answer, I wouldn’t believe it.5 As the philosopher, Donald Crosby (1932–) tells us, evil in our world does not hold a monopoly on life: Events of the present century show that humans have an incalculable capacity for destructiveness and evil, as well as for creativeness and good. Our potentialities do not point only in one direction but are rife with ambiguity. What I do mean to stress is the conviction that the outlooks and activities of concrete persons existing in time do not admit of reduction to some static universal or single, all-encompassing essence.6 Unlike Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) who, with specious logic, made an intellectual and moral sport out of good and evil, other more contemporary philosophers have, as a matter of course, taken on the battle against evil in human life in a religious context. Some of them have pursued the argument that evil is a prerequisite for the awareness of good, for, the sense of good thrives on the existence of evil. Others have argued that evil is the result of human free will. They have all been puzzled by the problem that if evil exists

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in the world, God can neither be totally good or all-powerful. They have distinguished between evil caused by natural or physical causes outside of man’s control, or have deliberated on moral evil which, as recent history has shown, has gone out of human control. Their rational, logical or academic conclusions have not been overly helpful since, in effect, they do little to explain why evil is in this world. As Henry John McCloskey (1925–) puts it: “God, were He all powerful and perfectly good, would have created a world in which there was no unnecessary evil.”7 John Leslie Mackie (1917–1981) was even more direct: “Of the proposed solutions of the problem of evil which we have examined, none has stood up to criticism.”8 The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003), though he would probably agree with Mackie, has had to fall back on a more existential position. Writing in 1968 of the Jewish holocaust in particular, he observed: The world which is a desperate place for the Jew after Auschwitz is becoming increasingly desperate for all men. Hope is being overwhelmed by despair; love by hate; commandment by loss of direction; and never far below consciousness is the spectre of a nuclear holocaust—the universal Auschwitz . . . . The Jew after Auschwitz is a witness to endurance. He is singled out by contradictions, which, in our post-holocaust world, are worldwide contradictions. He bears witness that without endurance we shall all perish. He bears witness that we can endure because we are commanded to endure.9 The need to endure evil does not lead to any understanding about why evil exists in our world nor where its sources are. Nor do the Christian and philosophic arguments on evil give us any decisive answers to the existence of evil in human life. Only Eastern religious approaches, while aware of evil, seem to have come closer to the healing aspect of the religious or sacred experience. The more positive approach to human destiny is central to Eastern religious thought. Writing of Hinduism, Huston Smith observed: Seen in perspective, the world is ultimately benign. It has no permanent hell and threatens no eternal damnation. It may be loved without fear; its winds, its ever-changing skies, its plains and woodlands, even the poisonous splendor of the lascivious orchid—all may be love provided that they are not dallied over indefinitely. For all is maya, lila, the spellbinding dance of the cosmic magician, beyond which lies the boundless good, which all will achieve in the end. It is no accident that the only art form India failed to produce was tragedy.10

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In Hinduism, the religious instinct without sentimentality, the good, was pure cosmic consciousness untouched by evil.11 As the modern Hindu mystic Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) has put it: For at the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect Spirit described in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world but inactive in it, without sinews of energy, without flaw of duality, without scar of division, unique, identical, free from all appearance of relation and multiplicity,—the pure Self of the Ad waitins, the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes those gates suddenly, without intermediate transitions, receives a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence which is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind is capable. This mystic experience of the sacred was far from the reaches of earthly evil. As another modern mystic and founder of Zen Buddhism, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966) expressed it, speaking of satori, of spiritual illumination: As far as the psychology of satori is considered, a sense of the Beyond is all we can say about it; to call this Beyond, the Absolute, or God, or a Person is to go farther than the experience itself and to plunge into theology or metaphysics. Even the “Beyond” is saying a little too much.13 These mystic experiences have a sense that everything earthly must pale by comparison. Still, from my vantage point, I cannot agree that the Sacred is inactive in our world or that the Sacred is unreal, ideas that are so central to the Hindu resolution of human evil. In a sense, both Christian and Eastern religions try to salvage the divine as a benign source: Christianity, by putting the onus on man for his fall; and Eastern religions, like Hinduism, by arguing the unreality of a world in which evil exists side by side with the good. By the same token, both spiritual attempts, in East and West, reveal a common urge to salvage the good by safeguarding the divine source. I have difficulty accepting either position: man is not as innately evil as Christianity would have us believe, although we cannot wash away that easily the atrocities of the twentieth century; on the other hand, our world is not as unreal as a Hindu would hold. Nor, for that matter, do we need to force any kind of benign design on the divine since, as I will try to show in the following essays, the Sacred is in itself a compassionate and healing power that is continuously active in human existence. We cannot solve the problem of evil in human life with our meager intellectual and spiritual resources and knowledge: for we know far too little either of divine purpose or of cosmic law. But our profound sense of the sa-

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cred presence in the universe, even though we can say little about it, gives us an inkling of that boundless good glimpsed through mystic experience, a good that all human beings will ultimately be capable of feeling and making it their own. Perhaps extreme evil must necessarily confront us before we can go on to a new stage of spiritual development. In this existential experience of our spirituality, we may finally come to a deeper and humbler understanding of our place in the universe. Jung was on the right track when he spoke of the spiritual need to develop our sense of seeing so that we might not one day fail to recognize the sacred presence as it crosses our path. If we can do that, we shall eventually move further and further away from the human evil that has contaminated our world and finally approach the more tranquil reaches of the good. What will guide us along the curve of the sacred then will not be religious or philosophic arguments about divine omnipotence or the lack of it, but the spiritual proofs we can gather about the compassionate and healing intent of the Sacred as it manifests itself in our lives.


Two HEALERS AND WOULD-BE HEALERS The religious prophet or the shaman as healer is a well-known phenomenon. Tom Harpur, (1929–) in his writing on spiritual healing, has shown how healing has always been an intrinsic part of the world’s religions.1 From my vantage point, Jesus of Nazareth (4 BC–29 AD), the religious prophet as healer, is a good example. Granted, some of his feats might strike us today as perhaps exaggerated—unless we read them as metaphorical statements. But Jesus, who would not be tempted by the devil in the desert wilderness to perform miracles, did use what appear to have been astounding powers of healing in the name of the Father and the Holy Spirit to help all those who expressed faith in him as the representative of the spiritual reality of the Kingdom of Heaven. He healed lepers, those paralyzed or in pain, and those who suffered from fevers or madness. He restored sight to the blind, helped the mute recover their speech, and raised the dead: So Jesus went round all the towns and villages teaching in their synagogues, announcing the good news of the Kingdom, and curing every kind of ailment and disease. The sight of the people moved him to pity: they were like sheep without a shepherd, harassed and helpless; and he said to his disciples, “The crop is heavy, but laborers are scarce; you must therefore beg the owner to send laborers to harvest the crop.” 2 The Gospels contain some problematical passages, especially when we view Jesus primarily as a healer. Such passages show him as an aggressive and belligerent teacher asking for absolute loyalty to himself and to the spiritual cause he represents from his followers: “No man is worthy of me who cares more for father or mother than for me.”3 He said to his disciples: You must not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son’s wife against her mother-in-law; and a man will find his enemies under his own roof.4 Such words are strangely at odds with Jesus the healer who pities the sick and who teaches his followers to turn the other cheek to violence. We need not take him literally here, for he loved to speak in parables, and the above passage might then have meant that his mission was from the start set against tradition. If he were also intent on giving his followers a sense of the religious, social and political consequences of his humanitarian and spiritual

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teaching, such harsh words then would not have contradicted the altruistic nature of his healing mission: Come to me, all those whose work is hard, whose load is heavy; and I will give you relief. Bend your necks to my yoke, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble-hearted; and your souls will find relief. For my yoke is good to bear, my load is light.5 It was in that spirit of social service that he passed on his power to heal to his disciples,6 so that their healing might increase the number of converts to the faith.7 If we view Jesus from a healer’s perspective, much that strains the credibility of his spiritual message for the modern reader, if not the believer, falls into its proper place. The Trinity—the Father, Son and Holy Ghost—the Immaculate Conception, the Resurrection, the redemption of man, the Kingdom of Heaven, become, in metaphorical terms, indications of the pure, transcendental spiritual source of his healing power. Looking at how the Catholic Church has, as it were, fictionalized Jesus’ earthly sojourn, is another story. In essence, his concrete acts of healing human pain, both physical and spiritual, have been made abstract and raised to symbolic, universal heights, they have, in modern terminology, been politicized for ideological purposes. His death on the cross has been made out to be a self-sacrifice for humanity at large, burdened with original sin—a concept that was introduced into Christianity by Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) at the end of the fourth century AD, but which had not had any part in early Christian thinking.8 Elevating Jesus to the level of Savior of humankind enabled the Catholic Church to institutionalize the initial Christian impulse of healing by replacing it with a religious and ideological superstructure whose fanatical spirit was in time to inspire the medieval Christian Crusades into Muslim lands and the brutal Catholic and Spanish inquisitions. Perhaps Jesus foresaw the idea of the coming of the Antichrist, a pseudo-healer of humanity when he said to the crowds of people assembled before him: Beware of false prophets, men who come to you dressed up as sheep while underneath they are savage wolves. You will recognize them by the fruits they bear. Can grapes be picked from briars, or figs from thistles?9 The spiritual power that allowed Jesus to heal the sick has, in our time, been accessed—albeit in a much humbler way—by a variety of secular healing practitioners. One such approach to healing is Therapeutic Touch (T. T.). Its originators, among others, were Dora Kunz (1904–), a clairvoyant and medical intuitive, and Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing. Together, they introduced T. T. in the United States in the 1970s. Practioners use T. T. as an


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alternative or complementary approach in many American and Canadian hospitals, and elsewhere in the world. The Western medical profession accepted T. T. when it was able to verify Kunz’s healer’s intuition and diagnosis. Controlled experiments showed that T. T. could increase a patient’s hemoglobin levels, create changes in brain waves, induce a sense of relaxation and calm in the patient, increase the weight of premature babies, bolster the immune system, reduce or eliminate pain altogether, heal fractures and all manner of wounds and infections more quickly and effectively.10 Dora Kunz believes that this healing power is a universal energy that religious and secular spirits alike can tap. Although we can teach anyone the methods of Therapeutic Touch so that he or she can become a recognized teacher and practitioner of it, the cosmic empowerment varies from person to person. In Kunz’s words, “Therapeutic Touch is based on the ideas that there is a universal healing energy available to all living things, and that we live in an orderly universe.”11 Not unlike the healers we have been discussing, European romantics also shared the sense of a universal connection to a higher therapeutic power. Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), for example, believed that the poet, as an intermediary between an otherworldly reality and human existence, could access a spiritual source of being with which to transform a flawed humanity through the moral power of his art. Writers and poets, who took it upon themselves to help remedy social ills, have ever since owed a debt to this romantic tradition of writing and have, in this sense, always acted as potential healers. In the same way, nineteenth-century Russian writers under fictional cover wrote against tsarist tyranny and human oppression. Alexander Pushkin’s (1799–1837) The Bronze Horseman, Ivan Turgenev’s (1818–1883) Notes of a Hunter, and Feodor Dostoevsky’s (1821–1881) “Notes from Underground” were all intent on touching the tyrant’s conscience and humanizing Russian society. In the twentieth century, many European writers, especially in postWorld War II West Germany, and Soviet Russian dissidents tried to regenerate the conscience of a world in the post-traumatic grip of the horrendous atrocities perpetrated by all the combatants of World War II. Albert Camus’s (1913–1960) The Plague, Günter Grass’s (1927) The Tin Drum and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s (1918–) Cancer Ward were all intent on reclaiming the spirituality and humanity lost in the holocaust of war and destruction. In Lionel Trilling’s (1905–1975) sense, their art was also a means for coping with the agony experienced: “What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.”12 Ultimately their works were to be a first step towards the hoped-for collective atonement and healing of a brutalized world. Ancient Greek philosophers and writers working for the moral improvement of their society were, not unlike the later romantics, spurred on by

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a sometimes almost mystic sense of a noumenal reality. In their spiritual wake, contemporary social philosophers—like William Barrett (1913–1992) and John Ralston Saul (1947–)—continue a philosophic tradition intent on ameliorating aspects of the present human condition in Western society. Barrett wrote about the profound spiritual want of Western culture concealed by a facade of impressive scientific and technological achievements in a predominantly materialistic world. In his Time of Need, he contended that the discontent, the self-doubt, the feeling of impotence and the sense of uncertainty that he found marked our civilization, were the symptoms of our having lost our spiritual links and our capability to feel in harmony with nature and the universe. This, in turn, had unleashed what he called that “deeper hunger of our time,” a spiritual hunger that craved a renewal of our sense of a sacred connection to the universe. Such a renewal could not be achieved by our intellectualizations of the void, but only through our becoming more aware of the needs of our inner self.13 A third of a century ago Barrett checked our cultural pulse and found it wanting. The intervening time has apparently done little to humanize our world. Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization, which is a critique of Western corporatist society, can only add fuel to our concerns about the dehumanization of our lives.14 Where Barrett saw our modern malaise in terms of our lost bond with nature, Saul, though equally uneasy about our endangered humanity, is more interested in our present relationship to those Western political and financial centers of control that practice their power behind a facade of democracy. His focus falls squarely on the generation of technocrats whose global and abstract manipulation of power is at the expense of the democratic rights and human needs of the individual citizen. He sees signs of this dehumanizing process, saying, “there has never been so much disposable money, yet there is no money for the public good.”15 In his view, the totalitarian drive of corporate society to keep its control of the communication of political and financial knowledge is a symptom of a sick civilization. Barrett’s and Saul’s profound concern with the health of the social organism of Western civilization, a sign of which is the narrowing of individual human potential, brings their work directly in touch with the universal healing impulse. Some writers and poets, social prophets and philosophers have been, at best, only would-be healers. They make up a special category of people who are themselves either physically and/or mentally ill, who are themselves in need of healing, but who act as if the social world around them needs healing and that only they can make it whole. As a rule, these would-be healers end up idealizing themselves in order to be able to function as social prophets and healers. The idealization of the self can take different forms. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, projected the sickness within himself onto the European society around him, a society that


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in his eyes could only be healed after its total or near-total destruction. His intense and desperate philosophical campaign to reshape European social, cultural and spiritual development, was ultimately less historical than personal by nature. Another group of these would-be healers idealizes the self by casting their deeply flawed humanity into self-aggrandizing contexts that allow them to project a “deep” concern for humanity even though their private lives fall far short of their avowed humanitarian literary intent. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), and Ernest Hemingway (1889–1961), though they preached the opposite, evinced monstrous lack of humanity, compassion, and selfish abuse of human beings.16 Though their writing may have had a therapeutic function for them personally, their acknowledged contribution to culture can in no way be taken as a substitute for their more than deficient humanity. Kenneth Burke’s (1897–1995) observation about the connection between illness and writing is especially apt for these unhappy souls.17 A different type of would-be healer is the “false god,” whether of the poetic or political variety, which manifests man’s “superhuman” potential. That the poet as a creator in his own right could challenge God himself, is an experience that came straight out of European romanticism.18 This romantic self-obsession and delusion was as true for the German romantics as for the Russian symbolists a century later. Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s (1762– 1814) typical egocentric remark in 1800, “the light is not outside of me, it is within me, and I myself am the light,”19 was echoed a century later by Fedor Sologub (1863–1927), one of Russia’s great symbolist poets, in 1908: I have bewitched all nature, And fettered every instant. What terrifying freedom My magic yields me! . . . Calling out to the primal power, I threw down a challenge to the heavens, But the heavenly bodies proclaimed That it was I myself who created nature.20 Small wonder if other symbolist poets like Alexander Aleksandrovich Blok (1880–1921) thought the power of their poetry could create a new earth, a new species of human being that would be part of what he called an “artistic humanity,” where art would finally supersede life.21 It was this idealized view of the power of poetry to transform psychological and social reality that fired the symbolist revolution in consciousness. The symbolist transformation of traditional novelistic structure, such as we find in Andrey Bely’s (1880–1934)

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novel Petersburg, mimicked the god-like creation of a new race of human beings. This poetic and fictional competition with God gave symbolist art a religious aspect. The iconoclastic mentality of the new man was everywhere in evidence in Russian symbolist writing. We find it in the symbolists’ repudiation of the familiar everyday world, in their flight from historical into mythical and cosmic time, in their rejection of traditional morality, in their lusting after the abnormal and the esoteric and, most of all, in their destructive fragmentation of consciousness. The foreboding vision in Bely’s Petersburg, of a twentieth-century human cataclysm, was a horrifying intuition of the coming of the new man.22 Symbolist iconoclasm, in its political aspect, became the Russian Revolution of 1917 with millennial visions of its own. It comes as no surprise that some of the outstanding symbolists and their immediate poetic descendants welcomed the revolutionary turbulence of 1917 in which they recognized a kindred revolution in consciousness. The only difference was that the spiritual exclusiveness of the symbolists turned into a proletarian racism, and now the political leader, instead of the poet, became the harbinger of a new, godless humanity. It was a vision already satirized by Dostoevsky in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” and by Evgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) in his antiutopian novel We.23 The glorification of the positive hero in Soviet proletarian and socialist realist fiction, epitomized in the nigh deification of political leaders such as Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), was the same symbolist idolatry of man in political guise. Katerina Clark (1941–), in her study of the Soviet novel, has put it well. The Soviet communist sense of revolutionary reality, she says, “was in effect a neoreligious doctrine of salvation and rebirth.”24 That the sacred was defiled in both Russian symbolism and Soviet communism—be it in Blok’s debasement of the Beautiful Lady or in the Communists’ official atheism and the destruction of churches—was no accident.

Three THE KORAN’S COMPASSIONATE SPIRIT Bismi Llahi RrahmƗni rrahƯmi In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.1 If, as we envisage it, the sacred universal source of being is compassionate by nature and intent on healing, we should expect sacred texts to reflect this, as was the case when we looked at Jesus, the man, in the New Testament. But since sacred texts have both sacred and human aspects to them, we might also distinguish the compassionate sacred aspect from its more negative institutionalized human counterpart which, as we saw in the case of Jesus, disfigured the original sacred healing intent. This sacred/human dichotomy is equally apparent in the Old Testament, where the tyrannical, inhumane and unjust way in which God treats human beings falls far short of divine compassion. We may think of the tragic destiny of Adam and Eve and ponder over the matter of original sin. We may reflect on the arbitrary manner in which God dealt with Abraham and Isaac, or with Job. Finally, we might remind ourselves of God’s moral intransigence against sinners in the last book of the New Testament—the Revelation of John— where they are damned to an eternal punishment in hell. All this appears far removed from the sacred compassionate tendency of the universe, and reads more like a punitive and despotic human intrusion.2 If we look past the vengeful Judgment Day—which did find its way into the Koran from Jewish and Christian sources, previously a foreign concept to the Arabian mind,3—the Koran’s central, compassionate focus, expressed through the prophet Muhammad (571–632), falls into its proper place. From this vantage point, Allah’s divine character is much more attune to the invocation of Him as the Merciful and the Compassionate with which each sura begins. Nor is He as unforgiving as the Old Testament God for, as we discover in the sura “Man,” no man can be held responsible for being either good or evil, because it is not in his power: for it is Allah who has created men and women and they “cannot will, except by the will of God.”4 As in Hinduism, the Koran has no place for original sin because, as Huston Smith points out, there has been no “catastrophic fall”: “God’s compassion and mercy are cited 192 times in the Koran, as against seventeen references to his wrath and vengeance,” and “Thanks to Allah’s mercy, the

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world of the Koran is finally a world of joy. There is air, sun, and confidence—not only in ultimate justice but also in help along the way and pardon for the contrite.”5 Unlike the Jewish and Christian gods of the Bible, Allah has an unmistakable divine longing for humankind, irrespective of whether they have sinned: “To God they shall return.”6 We find this recurring motif in the Koran as a whole, especially in the Luqman sura, which is one of the most compassionate to all humanity and, as Philip Hitti (1886–1978) tells us, “purely Arabian” in spirit.7 This predominance of compassion in the Koran gives its sacred character credibility. What reinforced this credibility further was the visionary and ecstatic process by which the contents of the Koran came to be communicated to Mohammed.8 Finally, it was—and still is to this day as we are told—the Koran’s inimitable language which with its “hypnotic effect” and its “sweet music” is seen as the ultimate proof of its authentic, sacred origin.9

Four TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SACRED IN RUSSIAN SOCIETY For a thousand years, Russia has remained a religious civilization. This is especially true of Old Russia before the advent of the eighteenth century. George P. Fedotov (1886–1951) put it this way: The poverty of intellectual culture in ancient Russia is amazing. For seven centuries—that is, until the seventeenth—we know of no scientific work in Russian literature, not even a dogmatic treatise. The whole of literary production had a practical, moral, or religious character, with the exception of the Chronicles, whose great artistic value vividly emphasizes, by contrast, the complete lack of scientific culture.1 Central to Russia’s religious development—along with the growth of the Russian monastic movement—was her remarkable medieval icon painting. This tradition helped create a religious Renaissance, which was both a spiritual response to what ultimately turned out to be a 250-year period of Mongol oppression and an attempt to revivify and heal the abused spirit by propagating the kenotic virtues of humility, pity and compassion.2 With the coming of the eighteenth century, Russia’s spiritual perspective widened to include the European Enlightenment. In this process of secularization, her religious cultural motive became morally oriented. This spiritual reorientation gave rise to the Russian intelligentsia. The birth of the Russian intelligentsia came much earlier than its usual nineteenth-century dating suggests. Antiokh Kantemir’s (1709–1744) morally motivated satires, Mikhail Lomonosov’s (1711–1765) scientifically inspired religious odes, Gavrila Derzhavin’s (1743–1816) democratizing poetry or, for that matter, Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev’s (1749–1802) political and revolutionary A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, all owe a debt to Russian spirituality turned moral which, through their work, tried to undermine the monolithic facade of Russian state despotism and the unconscionable brutalization of its largely serf population. The emphatic moral thrust against the inhuman social and political conditions of Russian life, the expression of pity and compassion for human suffering and sorrow so typical of Old Russian religious sensibility, suggests strongly that these literary forerunners of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia were motivated by the religious ideals of the past. When the philosopher and cultural historian Isaiah Berlin (1909– 1997) sat down to define the spiritual temper of the Russian intelligentsia of

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the nineteenth century, he resorted to religious analogies: “But the Russian intelligentsia . . . surrendered itself to what it believed to be true with a lifelong singleness of purpose seldom known outside of religious life in the West.”3 Elsewhere he described the Russian intelligentsia in similar terms: The concept of intelligentsia must not be confused with the notion of intellectuals. Its members thought of themselves as united by something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel.4 In the nineteenth century, the religiously motivated moral and humane drive of the eighteenth-century Russian Enlightenment was transmuted into Russia’s great creative and literary outburst in the years between 1820 and 1910. During this remarkable spiritual revival, that brings Russia’s earlier medieval Renaissance to mind, the tendency towards pity and compassion for suffering fellow man was everywhere in evidence. We need only think of Nikolay Gogol’s (1809–1852) story “The Overcoat,”5 of Ivan Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter,”6 of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot,7 or of all of Anton Chekhov’s (1860–1904) mature writing with its profound pity and compassion for the misery of the Russian people. Nikolay Berdyaev (1874–1948), who wrote of the religious, chiliastic and eschatological propensity of the Russian character, saw nineteenth-century Russian writing in the light of Russia’s religious experience: “The great Russian writers of the nineteenth century created not from joy of creative abundance, but from a thirst for the salvation of the people, of humanity and the whole world, from unhappiness and suffering, from the injustice and slavery of man.”8 If we look further to the Russian modernists, especially in their symbolist phase (1890–1910), we find that both in Alexander Aleksandrovich Blok’s (1880–1921) Verses on a Beautiful Lady,9 for example, or Fedor Sologub’s (1863–1927) superb poetry of the time contained an intense otherworldly sensibility at work that had weathered the realistic and materialistic onslaughts of the nineteenth century. As late as January 1918, Blok wrote his revolutionary poem, “The Twelve,” in which Christ, leading a band of Bolshevik soldiers, reflected the persistence of Russian religious sensibility. With the coming of the Russian revolution of 1917, the Russian spiritual impulse went into a political mode, into a communist ideal that promised to bring heaven to earth. Something similar had occurred during the eighteenthcentury European Enlightenment. In Carl L. Becker’s (1873–1945) words: Thus, the Philosophers called in posterity to exorcize the double illusion of the Christian paradise and the golden age of antiquity. For the love of God they substituted love of humanity; for the vicarious atonement the perfecti-

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bility of man through his own efforts; and for the hope of immortality in another world the hope of living in the memory of future generations.10 Similarly, the political idealism of the Russian communists became an earthbound atheism, a secular “religion” that deified man and glorified the state instead of God, that established unique humanitarian prophecies (notably Karl Marx), and that preached a Marxist teleology which promised an earthly paradise in the not too distant future. With the collapse of the Soviet Russian communist state by the end of the 1980s, the Russian Orthodox Church officially resurfaced in Russian life. In looking at the continuity of the Sacred in its historical guise in Russian society, I find it curious to find that one of the transformations of the Sacred in Russian culture was expressed antithetically by an inversion of the sacred impulse into an outright nihilism. The historian Crane Brinton (1898– 1968), writing about Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) as a disappointed idealist turned cynical, used the terms “inverted idealist” and “balked intellectual,” terms that are quite relevant to the experience of the Russian intelligentsia.11 In this case, an inhuman political system continuously thwarted the humane and idealistic strivings of its intelligentsia, triggering the inverted kind of idealistic response of which Brinton speaks. Over time, it became a nihilist temper of mind. I have elsewhere drawn attention to the moral ambivalence that such adherence to mutually exclusive ends created in the Russian psyche.12 Such cumulative moral tension in the ongoing and unresolved inner conflict between two incompatible tendencies made for a spiritual strain in the Russian intelligentsia that led to a profound frustration and despair which in the end engendered a nihilism that was out to undermine all those sacred impulses of life that nourished and sustained morality, humaneness and compassion. We have more than enough evidence of these nihilistic tendencies in the lives and works of some of the most outstanding figures of the nineteenthcentury Russian literary and cultural Renaissance, a critical time when the spiritual and intellectual aspirations and frustrations over the failure to create an effective civilized existence in a barbaric country had reached a breaking point. Alexander Pushkin’s political compromise with the state, leading to an uneasy conscience, is a telling case in point. Gogol, too, eulogized Russian autocracy and suffered the consequences of being torn between good and evil, between a desire for the humane that was in turn countered by his cruel imagination as a writer, an inner tension that resulted in a questionable humanity in his creative work. Dostoevsky spoke for them all when he observed, “Nihilism has appeared among us because we are all nihilists.”13 They, the Russian intelligentsia, were all nihilists because, in one way or another, they had all, like Dostoevsky, suffered the consequences of Russian absolutism. Dostoevsky’s work especially bears the traces of his experience of Russian political tyranny, especially his “Notes from Underground.”14 The phi-

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losopher and critic Lev Shestov (1866–1938) pointed to the spiritual cost of such tyranny and how it totally undermined Dostoevsky’s erstwhile idealism.15 We can see the effects of his experience of tyranny in the spiritual struggle that marks all his major, post-exile writing. In it, like Gogol before him, he tried desperately to create the good, to resuscitate his spiritual self, only to find that he was forever at the mercy of a creative drive that was nihilist at the core. But this spiritual despair that molded the nihilist temper of mind was, if we listen to Berdyaev, religious at its source. For him, this religious aspect of Russian nihilism was what made it into a non-European, Russian phenomenon. Coming close to Brinton in his definition of Russian nihilism as an “Orthodox asceticism turned inside out,” He wrote: Nihilism is a characteristically Russian phenomenon; in its Russian form, it is unknown in Western Europe . . . . Russian nihilism denied God, the soul, the spirit, ideas, standards and the highest values. And none the less nihilism must be recognized as a religious phenomenon.16 Berdyaev never quite put it in these words, but his meaning was that Russian nihilism was a religious phenomenon because of the spiritual intensity with which people feel the loss of ideals and the resultant disillusionment. Ultimately, the Russian nihilist experience was yet another way to keep, at least antithetically, the sense of the Sacred alive.

Five MUSSORGSKY’S NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN I’ll have to die alone anyway. Modest Mussorgsky in a letter to Vladimir Stasov At the end of his far too short life, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839– 1881) despaired that his musical genius would ever be recognized by a wider Russian public.1 Though he was a scion of a noble family whose roots went back to the ancient Rurik dynasty, the economic consequences of the liberation of the serfs in 1861 plunged him into dire poverty. For seventeen years, he eked out a living as a low paid civil servant, unable to afford his apartment and dependent on the help and charity of family and friends.2 Creative tragedy surrounded Mussorgsky’s life. His premature death in 1881, forty-two years of age, caused either by a nervous disorder and depression or by delirium tremens, cut short his musical career.3 As it was, his musical potential was also undermined by his not being able to afford a more thorough musical education. His life was complicated even more by his being caught between the nationalist aims and demands of a musical entourage bent on creating a Russian opera4 in contrast to his lyrical and poetic propensity for Russian song.5 While he did manage to finish one opera, Boris Godunov, based on Pushkin’s historical play (1869, rev. 1872), he never finished his second opera, Khovanshchina. His strength lay in the minor genre, as we can appreciate from his Sunless cycle of songs (1874) and his Songs and Dances of Death (1875–1877). I agree with his close friend, Arseny Arkad’evich Golenishchev-Kutuzov (1848–1912), who, speaking of Khovanshchina, said, “All the power, beauty, and merit of the opera are to be found in its songs.”6 At the moment of his death, Mussorgsky was heard to cry out: “All is over! Woe is me!”7 Yet luckless as his life was, the Sacred had always touched it. If we now look at the symbolic action of Mussorgsky’s operas, we realize that both have a religious and Christian longing for spiritual deliverance from earthly suffering and evil. We find the Pushkinian theme of guilt and conscience expressed in Boris Godunov’s clock scene, in the monk Pimen’s tale before the tsar, in Boris’s death scene, and in the yearning for paradise in the final scene of Khovanshchina, where the Old Believers go to their fiery deaths. These are all haunting expressions of a profound need for absolution and salvation. We discover a similar metaphorical expression of the liberation from earthly suffering in Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death based on the poetry of Golenishchev-Kutuzov, especially in the “Lullaby” and “Trepak.”

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Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s memoirs of Mussorgsky, which appear more trustworthy than the art critic and historian Vladimir Stasov’s recollections,8 suggest that Mussorgsky’s ultimate vantage point was neither political nor nationalist, not even populist, but spiritual: Mussorgsky’s nature constantly drew him, notwithstanding the convictions that were foisted upon him, toward pure, ideal poetry and beauty, to the higher, spiritual world, in which alone an artist may find solace and satisfaction. 9 Teresa Malecka, a Polish scholar, at a conference on Mussorgsky in 1989, also pointed to the religious aspect of Mussorgsky’s works: “It is hard to find traces of religious questions in the published documents but, on the other hand, the composer’s works are utterly saturated with them!”10 Speaking of Khovanshchina, James Billington was even blunter as to the underlying religious texture of Mussorgsky’s work: Gradually one senses that Russia is only superficially the subject of the opera, even though Mussorgsky spent endless months studying history before writing it. Russia is rather the background against which two deeper forces are contending for the destiny of men: the God-saturated world of nature and pride-saturated world of material force.11 Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain haunted his musical imagination for some twenty years during 1860–1880. Even then the work was still in creative ferment,12 but for once he was able to let the forces of light triumph, overcoming his pessimistic view of life.13 After that, we hear his experience of earthly suffering resounding metaphorically, again and again, in the rest of his music. The 1867 symphonic form of Night on Bald Mountain, where witches gathered near Kiev to pay homage to Satan, based on an almost completed piano version of 1863, came to Mussorgsky quite suddenly and unexpectedly and took only twelve days to complete: “Something so boiled up in me that I simply didn’t know what was going on with me . . . .”14 I would say that the sacred presence in the universe—whose spiritual persistence over so many years had been like a compassionate lifeline that would not let him go—had touched him. Mili Balakirev (1837–1910), the only professional musician in the Mighty Group of Five (moguchaya kuchka)—the others being Alexander Borodin (1833–1887), César Cui (1835–1918), and Nikolay RimskyKorsakov (1844–1908)—to which Mussorgsky belonged, gave an aesthetic and musical testimonial to this sacred presence in 1878: “[Mussorgsky] has taken from me the score of his witches’ sabbath to revise and rewrite. There

Musorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain

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are such powerful and beautiful things in it that it would be a pity to leave it in its present disorder.”15 Balakirev had a point, since Mussorgsky’s original version of Night on Bald Mountain was not all of a piece. Its most powerful section was the evocation of evil at the beginning, with a few echoes of it in the end, but otherwise interspersed with neo-folk melodic music that seemed to have little in common with its overpowering opening. But we must give Mussorgsky his due for his intent to have the forces of light triumph over the powers of evil. Like Dostoevsky, with whom he has sometimes been compared, the expression of evil or nihilism came more easily to Mussorgsky than the expression of the good. We cannot doubt that for its author, Night on Bald Mountain was an exorcism of earthly evil and suffering as the first morning light and the sound of a distant church bell broke up the satanic orgy and put to flight the dark powers of night. Though there was no sound of a church bell in the original version, it was part of Mussorgsky’s conception where, as Berezovsky tells us, Night on Bald Mountain was to begin with the: subterranean rumble of inhuman voices. The appearance of the spirits of darkness, followed by Chernobog (Satan). The glorification of Satan and then the Black Mass. The witches’ Sabbath. At the height of it, a distant village church bell rings out; it scatters the spirits of darkness. Morning.16 Perhaps we can view Night on Bald Mountain as an example of Mussorgsky’s general musical unevenness. Kurt Honolka’s incisive remark on Mussorgsky comes to mind, that he was “a truly fragmented genius” (ein wahrhaft fragmentarisches Genie).17 Still, for Mussorgsky, as he wrote to Balakirev in the autumn of 1867, his symphonic poem was “Russian and original,” “the first time” he had ever “independently approached a large work,” and after all, “a hallowed little thing.”18 This last remark suggests that perhaps, somewhere in the innermost depths of his being, he knew that with his Night on Bald Mountain he had been touched by the Sacred. This might also explain why this twelve-minute tone poem pursued and involved him for such a long time. When he chose to set Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s Sunless cycle of poems to music, the last and most beautiful song of the sequence, “On the River,” expressed a similar intuition of transcendental presence: A mysterious voice, agitating my soul, Caresses me, terrifies me, brings me to doubt. Does it tell me to listen? I’d stay rooted to the spot; Is it driving me away? I would run in confusion. Does it call me unto its depths? I would plunge without looking back!19


Six T. S. ELIOT’S “THE WASTELAND” The Sacred sometimes touches a time of suffering, death and destruction by way of literature or poetry. Hans Erich Nossack’s (1901–1977) recollection of the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943, saw man transfigured by a sacred presence: But the countenance of man as I remember it then, who could ever forget it. His eyes had become more haunting and were transparent the way they are on icons. The cold, mean, stingy and separating window pane had burst, and through the gaping openings eternity blew unimpeded out of his past and into his future, and anointed his countenance for his eternal and sacred passage.1 Like Nossack’s The Destruction, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) wrote “The Wasteland” in the wake of a World War. Where Nossack’s reminiscences bore poetic, compassionate, and personal witness to the disaster, Eliot’s poetry reads more like a sacred and religious poem taking contemporary Western European civilization to task—much like the biblical prophets of old—for its spiritual bankruptcy. Cecil Maurice Bowra’s (1898–1971) exploration of “The Wasteland” is one of the best. He suggests that, in the final analysis, the poem, if not the poet, shows that redemption, spiritual recovery, and revival for European man after the recent cataclysm is impossible.2 The poem becomes “a political diagnosis of a grave psychological malady” that may well be incurable. Yet, at the same time, Bowra appears to leave the door open for another reading of the poem where, beyond the textual analysis—“what matters is the emotional sequence, the impact which the symbols make on us as they appear . . . . If we follow them (the scenes and images, C.V.P.) and respond to them, we find the main experience that the poem has to give.”3 In his 1956 essay, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” Eliot appears to suggest a similar critical approach to poetry. He distinguished between an intellectual and emotional response to a poem and stressed the importance of each reader’s “direct experience” and “immediate contact” with a poem: We must not confuse knowledge—factual information about a poet’s period, the conditions of the society in which he lived, the ideas current in his time implicit in his writings, the state of the language in his period— with understanding his poetry. Such knowledge, as I have said, may be a necessary preparation for understanding the poetry; furthermore, it has a

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED value of its own, as history; but for the appreciation of poetry, it can only lead us to the door: we must find our own way in.4

In this chapter, I will exploit Bowra’s sense of “the emotional sequence, the impact which the symbols make on us,” in order, in Eliot’s meaning, to find my personal way into “The Wasteland.” “The Wasteland,” published in 1922,5 is reminiscent of Wolfgang Borchert’s (1921–1947) play, The Man Outside, written in the wake of the Second World War. In works such as these, which reflect catastrophic and traumatic experiences, metaphor carries the implicit message. In this sense, the metaphorical impact may run counter to the expressed social intent, as was the case with Borchert’s play, in which the metaphorical language, the images, ran totally counter to the social optimism with which Borchert tried to infuse his play. In Eliot’s poem, we find just the reverse, as we will see, so that the poet’s explicit pessimism about the chances of Western European society spiritually surviving the consequences of war, is in turn countered by the more hopeful implicit emotional sequence of the poem, by the metaphorical thrust of crucial imagery. I should say at the outset that, unlike Borchert, who quite consciously couched his optimistic social message in straightforward language while his imagery carried the negative vision concerning Western European society, Eliot used imagery and metaphor to express both hopelessness and hope. He did this consistently in all five sections of the poem, and this gave a fugue-like structure to the whole in which the sorry state of contemporary man was always countered—be it ever so subtly at times—by the wind which expressed a spiritual and sacred presence and suggested potentially a more optimistic perspective for European man. In the first section we have, on the one hand, the crowd of the dead flowing over London Bridge, especially Eliot’s paraphrase of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes—we know this thanks to Eliot’s footnoting of the poem—all of which points to the explicit and desperate message of the poem: Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. But the wind, instead of symbolizing emptiness as it did in Ecclesiastes, is used differently by Eliot, and blows instead out of Tristan and Isolt and is the carrier of love and hope:

T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

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Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu. (Fresh blows the wind / Homewards) In the second section, “A Game of Chess,” the spiritual urgency concerning contemporary men an women amid amorous and philistine settings, is brought out by the five times emphatically repeated “Hurry up please it’s time,” an urgency which is driven home by Eliot’s reference to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, where Cleopatra’s artificial perfumes clash with their antithesis, a fresh breeze: In vials of ivory and colored glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense of odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window . . . The wind was even blowing under the door: What is that noise? The wind under the door. What is that noise now? What is the wind doing? The next section, called “The Fire Sermon,” continues the philistine and cheap amorous sequence in the spirit of: The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. This time Teresias, the prophet and seer, “the most important personage in the poem,” speaks for all humanity engaged in loveless sexual encounters that add nothing to life. Through Teresias’s lines, Eliot harks back to the fresh wind blowing homewards in Tristan and Isolt: At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Teresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward and brings the sailor home from sea,

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The short fourth section, “Death by Water,” plugs into the last line above and once more picks up the theme of wind, this time by looking in the direction from where the wind blows, from where the sacred spirit comes to all those in need, who have replaced the spiritual in man with shallow materialistic values: Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under the sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell . . . . Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look homeward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. The fifth, and last, section “What the Thunder said,” recapitulates the spiritual bankruptcy of Western man through images of drought and a doomed waterless world, and does this most powerfully in the following lines: A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. The dark vision is countered by the presence of the spiritual “in the violet light” which reminds us of Teresias “at the violet hour.” Eliot tells us in a footnote that he expresses the spiritual through his reference to Jesus on the journey to Emmaus, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” The thrice-repeated incantation, “Shantih shantih shantih,” Eliot tells us in another footnote, made up the traditional endings of the Upanishads. In his view, it refers to “the Peace that passeth understanding.” His use of the Upanishads is fitting for this context, since they focused on man’s relation to the universe. Here too, as in each preceding section, the wind brings rain to a world that has lost its spiritual center, which metaphorically completes the poem’s sacred message:

T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

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In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain That Eliot was not caught up in a cultural and moral indictment of Western European society and gave his poem a spiritual purpose, suggests to us that ultimately his intent was not only to damn but also to salvage. Though his two metaphorical sequences—the one disparaging, the other intent on healing—were expressed in secular and sacred modes respectively. In the end, his spiritual message, couched in the imagery of wind, carried the main metaphorical thrust of the poem. That came closest, in my view, to “what the poetry is aiming to be.”7 What any great poetry was aiming to be—as he suggested in a 1955 reference to Goethe8—was to provide, especially to a world in ruin, all the possible wisdom and spiritual insight. In a century of human atrocity, T. S. Eliot is one of only a few who has kept his sense of the spiritual and the sacred alive in his creative work. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), and Nossack did likewise. For having communicated to us this sense of the Sacred in “The Wasteland,” Eliot is, what he said William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and others like him were, namely, that historically significant “part of consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”9


Seven GÜNTER GRASS’S THE TIN DRUM: THE SACRED IN DESTRUCTIVE GUISE The European romantic experience has two sides. Some romantics—of the German variety, like Friedrich Schiller for example—idealized the sacred and transcendental impulse in art as an aesthetically creative and morally transforming power in human life. Others, on the other hand, like Friedrich Nietzsche, gloried in the creative impulse as a nihilist force bent on destroying the sacred. Mario Praz (1896–) and Isaiah Berlin have, each in their own way, drawn attention to this other, destructive, side of romanticism.1 Günter Grass, one of the most significant of European writers, who at long last received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, combined this twofold romantic vision by utilizing in his unique way both the destructive and sacred modes of the romantics to express his quest for the Sacred. The central character of The Tin Drum is little Oskar. Oskar’s destructiveness goes through the novel like a red thread. His protest against contemporary European, especially German Nazi culture, turns into a refusal on his part to grow physically—but not intellectually—after the age of three. He admits, “What I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters.”2 He destroys in order to create anew. We find this longing for a better world expressed in a new image of man when he and Klepp give vent to their existential sense of grief by cutting up pictures in a photograph album: We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with the little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new and, we hoped, happier creatures. Occasionally we gave a picture away.3 We can see many examples in the novel of Oskar’s destructive nature. His glass-shattering voice was one. But we can see it most in his intent to destroy social cohesion, the most graphic example of which was his continuous undermining and/or elimination of the family unit altogether. For not only was he guilty of the deaths of his two presumed fathers, Bronski-Matzerath, but he was, in all likelihood, also the cause of his mother’s suicide. The Dusters,

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whose leader he became, fought—apart from their anti-Nazi activities—not only against their parents but against all adults. The pictures of Goethe and Rasputin—order and chaos—and those of Beethoven and Hitler hanging side by side, were an indictment of German culture and society. So was Oskar’s taking the place of Jesus in the lap of the Virgin Mary in the Church of the Sacred Heart. When Oskar took over the leadership of the Dusters as Jesus, their fight against the Nazi war machine became a spiritual battle. Even earlier, his disruption of Nazi marches with his drumming was directed against a totalitarian regime that had lost all sense of humaneness. Sigmund Markus’s death during Kristallnacht, the toystore owner who had provided Oskar with his drums; and the extermination of Fajngold’s whole family at Treblinka, speak legion for the inhumanity of the Third Reich. The most eloquent motive for Oskar’s intent to destroy Hitler’s millennium is imparted to us in one of Grass’s most haunting images of the Holocaust: Santa Claus turned Gasman, overcoming the sweet fragrances of Christmas with the stench of the gas chambers: An entire credulous nation believed, there’s faith for you, in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the gasman. I believe—such is my faith—that it [Christmas] smells of walnuts and almonds. But it smelled of gas. Soon, so they said, t’will be the first Sunday of Advent. And the first, second, third and fourth Sundays of Advent were turned on like gas cocks to produce a credible smell of walnuts and almonds, so that all those who liked to crack nuts could take comfort and believe: He’s coming. He’s coming. Who is coming? The Christ child, the Saviour? Or is it the heavenly gasman with the gas meter under his arm, that always goes tick tock? And he said: I am the Saviour of this world, without me you can’t cook . . . .4 If Oskar’s glass-shattering voice was symbolic of his destructive powers, his tin drum—sacred and immortal—represented self-sacrifice and atonement. His drumming expressed a never-ending process of guilt and absolution, in which new drums forever replaced the old and used-up ones. His drum was compared to a martyred object, and he to Jesus, to a cross and Savior, whose drumming was like a Eucharistic offering of salvation. In effect, his drum became an instrument of conscience for a humanity in need of atonement for the atrocities of war and the Holocaust. The onion cellar was but a typically Grassian satirical reminder of the expiatory nature of the novel. Ultimately, Oskar’s drumming was intended to bring about spiritual cleansing and healing. The only constant in this world of guilt and expiation was the Sacred. For Oskar was powerless to shatter the windows of the Church of the Sacred Heart which had survived the war. He also became a disciple of Jesus when

Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum

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Jesus proved himself to be as versatile a drummer as Oskar himself. Finally, Oskar accepted the enduring reality of the Sacred when he himself became a personification of Jesus, and like Jesus tried to make whole the fragmented image of man by atoning for the inhumanity of a barbaric age. The art professor’s words to his students, as they attempted to sketch the hunchbacked Oskar, pointed to Oskar’s self-sacrificial role: The coal-breathing professor gave his disciples a short briefing: what he wanted was expression, always expression, pitch-black desperate expression. I, Oskar, he maintained, was the shattered image of man, an accusation, a challenge, timeless yet expressing the madness of our century. In conclusion, he thundered over the easels: “I don’t want you to sketch this cripple, this freak of nature, I want you to slaughter him, crucify him, to nail him to your paper with charcoal!5 As in ancient Greece, where Fate stood higher than even the gods, so in Grass’s universe there was a power that stood above the Sacred, and that was Conscience. A ubiquitous, protean, fear-inspiring presence pursued Oskar throughout the novel in the shape of the “Black Witch” (die Schwarze Köchin). Critics have read all kinds of meanings into her, but Grass was quite explicit as to her identity at the end of the novel: And behind the high altar—what would Catholicism be without the Witch who blackens every confessional with her shadow? It was her shadow that fell when Sigismund Markus’s toys were smashed to bits. The brats in the court of our building . . . they knew: For what did they sing as they cooked their brick-meal soup: “Where’s the Witch, black as pitch? Here’s the black wicked Witch. Ha, ha, ha! You’re to blame. And you are too, You’re most to blame, You! you! You! Where’s the Witch, black as pitch?” She had always been there.6 Oskar, driven by Conscience, remained in the therapeutic service of the Sacred. Ultimately, the writer, Grass, spoke through his fictional characters. We find this therapeutic motive repeatedly expressed metaphorically in the major novels that were to follow The Tin Drum. We find, for example, a telltale passage in The Flounder—as great a novelistic tour de force as The Tin Drum had been—which harks back both to Oskar’s and Grass’s sacred quest. In it, Grass speaks to us through the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sea. In a village in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Vasco visits a school and the teacher shows him a history book on India that mentions his exploits:

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED In one little book, which tells the history of India in Hindi script, Vasco sees himself portrayed in simple lines, bearded under a velvet cap. In some wrinkle of his traveler’s existence he is proud or touched, but he is also somewhat put out because he has made school history and become textbook material. (What do they actually know about me? About my restlessness. Always looking for goals beyond the horizons. Using my nautical skill as a means of reaching God. And my lifelong fear of Dominican poison. Everything has died away. But I’m still inwardly rich in figures . . . .7

I have no better way to end this chapter than with Grass’s direct words, “using my nautical skill as a means of reaching God.” (Gott wollt ich durch nautische Kunst erreichen). The Tin Drum was one of his first and, I might add, most successful attempts at reaching out for the Sacred.

Eight A MEDITATION ON ALBERT CAMUS Albert Camus’s portrayal of Meursault in The Stranger1 and of Clamence in The Fall2 described the tragic consequences of the loss of one’s inner spiritual balance through excessive sensuality or intellectuality. Camus’s preoccupation with extreme experiences or states of mind and emotion reflected his concerns with anything that might impair human well-being. This explains his intense philosophic interest in extreme situations reflected in questions such as the meaninglessness of human existence, suicide, the absurd, nihilism and religious and political figments of the imagination—all aspects of a destructive sensibility that might undermine or destroy man’s sense of connection to human society and the world of nature. Given all this, we understand his emphasis on lucidity of mind and language, on realistic clearsightedness, on courage in confronting falsehoods, his insistence on truth and especially his focus on love and compassion, which promotes human interaction. He tried to right the image that some critics had of him as an anguished and pessimistic writer, by saying in an interview of May 1951: When I do happen to look for what is most fundamental in me, what I find is a taste for happiness. I have a very keen liking for people. I have no contempt for the human race. I think that one can feel proud of being the contemporary of a certain number of men of our day whom I respect and admire . . . . At the center of my work there is an invincible sun. It seems to me that all this does not make up a very sad philosophy?3 It was this invincible sun that he carried within him, which kept him in touch with people, that explains best his sense of collective partnership with the rest of humanity and his feeling of moral responsibility that he shared with others, especially in times of crisis. His political and social involvements show this: his expulsion from the communist party, his resistance work in the French underground against the Germans which spilled over into his novel The Plague,4 and his lifelong and unresolved anguish over French colonialism in Algeria. Camus’s deep sense of collective partnership with real people—not abstractions—on the social level, was re-experienced on an individual, poetic level in the feeling of harmony that he had for nature. In his reminiscences of Algeria, written at different times of his life, we read, “In the middle of winter I finally understood that an invincible summer reigned within me.” Even more poignant was his remark that “without my love and this beautiful outcry of

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rock, everything was useless. The world is beautiful, and there is no salvation at all outside of it.”5 Though Camus could not intellectually accept the reality of a God or of a transcendental sacred presence in human existence, he felt something akin to it in his animistic experience of nature where the ineffable cried out in rock and was transmuted into an all-encompassing love. He tried, in the here and now, to find something that went beyond an existence merely bounded by death. Though established religions in East and West have capitalized on this inescapable fact of human life—and Camus was a living challenge to this attempt of enslaving man’s intelligence—it was never the institutionalized collective drive, but the individual spiritual instinct in him that kept the eternal, sacred spark alive. Perhaps what Octavio Paz (1914–1998) called “the eternity of the poetic instant,” “pure actuality,” and the “immediate apprehension of the flow of reality,” came closest to Camus’s spiritual sensibility.6 It was this poetic apprehension of the fleeting moment that inspired Camus’s creative endeavors, an apprehension which was like a spiritual intuition of what seemed to lie just beyond us, a sense of reality that suggested that the given world was greater than it appeared. Though Camus believed that man was ultimately his own end, his vision, which we can sense between the lines, reached further than his denial of the sacred. Perhaps this is why he said, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” because “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”7 He said something similar in his Notebooks: 1942–1951: “Brief psychology of Adam and Eve: he formed for contemplation and courage; she for softness and alluring grace. He for God alone; she for God in him.” It was this “God in Him” that inspired his lyrical essays on Algeria, essays full of the poetry of being and connected to nature and the universe. Though he denied the universe as a source of divine power, his loyalty to nature kept him in touch with the Sacred. That is probably also why, in his defense of intelligence, he was at the same time critical of it: “Modern intelligence is in utter confusion. Knowledge has become so diffuse that the world and the mind have lost all point of reference. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.” It was because of the nihilist potential of thought that he struck out against totalitarianism in whatever shape or form, be it on religious, moral or political ground. In his eyes, religious and political institutions only undercut the sacred experience of being. It was, “up to us to create God.” That is also why he could note in his diary: “What could be (What is) immortality for me? Living until the last man has disappeared from the earth. Nothing more.” Sisyphus’s only hope was that it was impossible “for man to despair utterly.”8 The reason for that may have been a sense of the sacred or ineffable in human existence. Camus appears to have found spiritual solace and refuge from a catastrophic and soul-destroying time both in nature on his beloved Mediterranean

A Meditation on Albert Camus

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beaches near Oran, and in his literary work. His atheist Meursault, awaiting execution, woke up one night to find “stars in my eyes. The noises of the countryside reached me. The odors of night, of earth and of salt refreshed my temples. The wonderful peace of summer asleep flowed into me like a tide.”9 He expressed a similar feeling of communion with nature towards the end of his life, in his story “The Adulteress,” where Janine, the female protagonist, rediscovered her lost self at a moment of spiritual insight: [S]he flung herself into the night . . . . She ran, half blind, in the darkness . . . . Her eyes opened at last on the expanse of night . . . . Before her the stars were falling one by one and were being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time, Janine opened up a little bit more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of human beings, the craziness and stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last. At the same time, she seemed to recover her roots, and the sap again rose in her body which had ceased trembling.10 Camus’s feeling for nature created a private and intimate space for him where he could confront himself in all his primordial complexity and keep in touch with the essence of his inner being, which was far removed from all those public places he spent a lifetime castigating. He said as much himself in one of his Notebook entries of March 1951: “If I were to die unknown to the world, in the depths of a cold prison, at the last moment the sea would fill my cell, would come and raise me above myself and help me to die without hate.”11 He said it even more plainly during a 1959 interview, shortly before his death in an automobile accident. To the question, “You once wrote, ‘Secret of my universe: imagine God without the immortality of the soul.’ Can you define more exactly what you meant?” he answered “Yes. I have a sense of the sacred and I don’t believe in a future life, that’s all.”12 So Camus, somewhere in his inner self, felt the sacred in the guise of nature. He sensed the wider reaches of the universe in his contemplation of the sea and the rocks. Though he shrank from universal ties, it was in the “small” that he experienced the universe, and the small carried within it such cosmic sweep.


Nine THE SACRED AS SUBATOMIC PARTICLE, IMAGE, SUBLIMINAL INTELLIGENCE OR METAPHOR The sacred healing energy often manifests itself in other surprising contexts. In modern physics, for example, the outward visible events are not always a good indication of the internal reality or meaning behind them. The most exciting insight of the physicist Fritjof Capra, in his The Tao of Physics, is the intriguing parallel he draws between modern scientific conceptualization and ancient mystical experience, so that scientific quantum reality can be seen as a modern, secular extension of ancient mystical vision.1 His parallels suggest that the patterns of intuitive thought in mystical vision and in the scientific conceptualizations of quantum physics are intrinsically related, shaped as they seem to be by a cognate energy force that seems to be able to function in both spiritual and in more visible scientific contexts. The reappearance of these ancient spiritual lines of force, as it were, in the subatomic world of quantum physics, undermining in the process the traditional, causally-bound model of physical reality, is a fascinating phenomenon. By the time Capra had republished his 1975 findings in a 1982 edition of the Tao, he was able to confirm that parallels to Eastern mysticism could be found not only in physics, but also in biology, psychology and other sciences, which meant that human consciousness had a much bigger role to play in any future theory of physical phenomena. The pervasiveness of the mystical mode of thought and intuition in the modern physical and life sciences was an intriguing discovery. An equally intriguing direction to take in this context was Capra’s connecting mystical sensibility to a transcendental Consciousness bent on the alleviation of human suffering. In his words, “suffering arises, in the Buddhist view, whenever we resist the flow of life and try to cling to fixed forms which are all maya, whether they are things, events, people or ideas.”2 His exploration suggests strongly that the undermining of causality in quantum physics—a causality that is itself a fixed form of thinking—sets up yet another intriguing theoretical model of mystical energy at work alleviating suffering. As we have seen, this is similar to the fields of creative writing and social criticism where the suffering consciousness of writer and social philosopher alike, counters the fixed forms of inhumane social and political forms of control. Capra’s compelling overview of some of the latest scientific findings in his The Web of Life concentrates on the physical interconnectedness of life on

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earth and in the universe at large.3 These scientific findings in fields as diverse as microbiology, chemistry and quantum physics, genetics, neuroscience and immunology, in Gestalt psychology and cybernetics, in nonlinear mathematics, ecology, and philosophy suggest that the earth, in its four and one half billion years of existence, both in its non-living and living parts, with human life and consciousness at its apex, is an organic part of a universal life process. In so doing, he provides us with concrete scientific proof that the space-time continuum is animate. Evidence of life throughout the universe leaves us with a credible basis for suggesting in turn that such life process and consciousness at large contributes to the reality of the existence of a spiritual and sacred dimension. One of the key components behind this new scientific vision of reality is “systems thinking.” Systems thinking is an attempt not to be caught up in the causal relationships and/or structures that define any one scientific field, but to relate these events to and integrate them into an overall more comprehensive external pattern to which these events—in one or more scientific fields—could be meaningfully related. This focus on the wider, integrative pattern, the network, is more important than the specifics of any one particular scientific field. Another key concept in this new approach is “self-organization.” Capra gives us a convincing picture of biological and human evolution in which all nature is imbued with a potential for interactive self-organization for eliminating flaws in any one living world in order to ensure its survival. This selforganization and self-regulation seems to have been at work already in the chemical systems that predated the emergence of life, and functions much like a built-in power of cognition that determines and creates the kinds of preferred patterns that enable the development and continuance of life. A third discovery connected with the research in systems thinking and self-organization is that there always seems to be some patterned order and process underneath seeming randomness and chaos. It turns out, amazingly, that the further the events of any one system of being are from the equilibrium, from the predictable and recognizable causal and structural relationships we have assigned to or found in any one system, the more complex and open they are to self-organization. Ultimately, this suggests that what Capra describes as a mind at work is separate from the human brain: Mind is not a thing but a process—the process of cognition, which is identified with the process of life. The brain is a specific structure through which this process operates.4 Referring to Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco J. Varela’s Santiago theory of cognition, Capra writes:

The Sacred as a Subatomic Particle . . .

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the brain is not necessary for mind to exist. A bacterium, or a plant, has no brain but has a mind. The simplest organisms are capable of perception and thus of cognition. They do not see, but they nevertheless perceive changes in their environment—differences between light and shadow, hot and cold, higher and lower concentrations of some chemical, and the like.5 If mind and cognition are identified with the process of life, which, as today’s scientific community believes, extends to millions of other planets in the universe, it takes but a small shift in focus to imagine this life force as having a spiritual and sacred dimension, especially since consciousness can be seen as the carrier of the sacred impulse in being. Yet Capra, in his The Web of Life, does not read a spiritual meaning into the scientific findings he discusses, as he did in his The Tao of Physics. The process of life as a universal factor, he maintains quite objectively, cannot provide us with any scientific proof of a spiritual or sacred first cause or teleology. He admits: For many people, including myself, it is philosophically and spiritually more satisfying to assume that the cosmos as a whole is alive, rather than thinking of life on Earth existing within a lifeless Universe.6 Having convinced us sufficiently that the universe is not lifeless; in the end, he does leave enough room for a spiritual dimension: Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels a sense of belonging, of connectedness, to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence. It is, therefore, not surprising that the emerging new vision of reality based on deep ecological awareness is consistent with the so-called perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions, whether we talk about the spirituality of Christian mystics, that of Buddhists, or the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American traditions.7 Imagery, as a therapeutic form of healing generally—not just by way of fictional or poetic texts—gives us yet another context in which cosmic energy may be said to be at work. A few years ago, Jeanne Achterberg (1942–) highlighted the therapeutic function of imagery in this wider, more encompassing psychic sense from both a psychological and medical perspective in Imagery in Healing. Drawing parallels to imagery associated with the “transpersonal healing imagery” of shamans, psychics and “metaphysical healers,” she cre-

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ated a scientific medical basis for exploring the “imagination as healer.” Likening the healing process as such to poetry—“The activity of consciousness and imagination is more poetry than prose, and is only imperfectly understood when language is used in its description,”—she suggested that the curative power ultimately comes to us from a transcendental dimension of imagery which, in man, becomes subconscious imagistic activity: “As for the immune system, the imagination has consistently proved to have the most directive influence.”8 Deepak Chopra (1947–), an endocrinologist by training, who became interested in the healing wisdom and power of Ayurveda, wrote a captivating book called Quantum Healing, in which he explored the spiritual healing dimension that lay beyond the more body-oriented practice of Western medicine: “the faintest shadow-line separates the human body from the cosmic body.” In his view, body and mind are one; they are also one with nature and the universe. The healing energy in the cosmos becomes the subliminal intelligence in our human frame, and if we do not block it with our scientific intellect or our Western medical process of thinking, it can have a tremendous curative impact on disease. But for this to happen, the Western medical emphasis has to shift: “An Ayurvedic physician is more interested in the patient he sees before him than in his disease.” If this change is to be realized, a shift in consciousness must also occur: If asked for an exact definition of quantum healing, I would say this: quantum healing is the ability of one mode of consciousness (the mind) to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another mode of consciousness (the body). It is a completely self-enclosed process. If pressed for a shorter definition, I would say simply that quantum healing makes peace. When consciousness is fragmented, it starts a war in the mindbody system. This war lies behind many diseases, giving rise to what modern medicine calls their psychosomatic component. The rishis (ancient seers of India, C.V.P.) might call it “the fear born of duality,” and they would consider it not a component but the chief cause of all illness. In Chopra’s view, the key to opening up one’s consciousness to this inner cosmic intelligence or energy we all carry within us, an intelligence that lies beyond us and which is yet very much a part of our mind-body system, is “meditation, the bliss technique, the primordial sound.” “Bliss is that silence, just as intelligence is,” which comes through meditation, and the experience of bliss can heal the inner rift between mind and body. “Bliss is the vibration that intelligence sends into the world,” and ultimately sound and silence, all in one, he writes, reveal the cosmic mind at work.9 Chopra could have been defining the poetic process. Healing energy may also manifest itself in literature and poetry through metaphor, which may on occasion have the function of shielding us from the

The Sacred as a Subatomic Particle . . .

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traumatic impact of an event or experience. These metaphorical protective mechanisms can, for instance, be found in fairytales and myths, which sometimes comprise veiled accounts of our psychological and cultural inadequacies. One of the best examples of the use of metaphor to reduce traumatic impact is objectification, such as we find in Albert Camus’s The Plague or in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.10 In all such cases, objectification undercuts traumatic experiences and protects writer and reader alike from overexposure to human suffering and grief. Grass, who is especially fond of this practice, provides us with a good example of objectification in one of his poems where he describes how Else Fenske perished high up in the mountains when she: during her summer vacation missed her footing at high altitude and fell into a silent crevasse, leaving only her little sunshade behind and a high C.11


Ten ALBERT EINSTEIN Mankind remains as idiotic as it always was, and it’s no great pity; but that no one would then play Bach or Mozart any more–that is a pity. Einstein to Hermann Broch The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) exemplifies how the instinct to search for scientific and religious truth, instead of being at odds, can coexist in one and the same person. That Whitehead was aware of the sacred dimension lying beyond the realm of observable data, we can gather from the following passage in his Science and the Modern World: Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things, something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.1 Albert Einstein was no stranger to this spiritual dichotomy and his experience of inspired and unexpected scientific thought and discovery was intimately connected to what Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) once described as those “obscure workings of the creative mind” in scientific enterprise, which come to us from the sacred dimension of being.2 Even if we cannot fully understand the scientific achievement of Einstein’s genius in twentieth-century modern physics—and I cannot—we can, in a small way, appreciate the amazing creative impetus, the intellectual energy coupled with an unwavering intuition that went into the making of his revolutionizing scientific thought. A characteristic mark of his creativity was the suddenness and unexpectedness of his discoveries in physics. Albrecht Fölsing (1940–), a science journalist and head of the department of Science and Nature of a German public television channel, wrote an excellent biography of Einstein. In it, he had this to say about the year 1905, Einstein’s annus mirabilis (miracle year), when he wrote four scientific firsts which surprised Einstein as much as it did others:

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED These four papers would transform physics. They were completed in the brief span between March 17 and June 30, 1905—a little more than three months. The first—“very revolutionary”—publication was far ahead of its time but sixteen years later would earn Einstein the Nobel Prize. The second, which soon earned him a doctorate from Zurich University, is one of the most frequently quoted works of the century. The third established him as the founder of modern statistical mechanics. The fourth contains in fundamental form what would soon come to be called the special theory of relativity.3

The unexpectedness of Einstein’s discoveries and the unbelievable speed with which they welled forth suggests creativity at work, which had more to do with unconscious processes than with the conscious, logical, scientific and theoretical thinking, which, more often than not, had led Einstein into many blind alleys. The unscientific mode of his thinking also struck scientific colleagues who worked with him in America: [They] felt enormously enriched by being able to share in the thoughts and the work of a genius. They noted with fascination how Einstein’s thinking differed from conventional thought. He seemed to them less a strictly logical theoretician than a creative artist, full of imagination and frequently using arguments that would have been out of place in a scientific essay: “Einstein was motivated not by logic in the narrow meaning of this concept, but by a sense of beauty,” one of his collaborators recalled. “In his work he was always looking for beauty.”4 Einstein’s aesthetic approach to scientific problems—he was, after all, also a passionate violinist—was enhanced by a profound religious feeling for the cosmic world of nature that he tried to express in the language of physics and mathematics. In November 1930, shortly before his sea voyage to California, he wrote “Religion and Science,” which appeared in The New York Times Magazine. In Fölsing’s words: Einstein reproduced the critique of religion common among educated freethinkers, but then emphasized a higher level of “cosmic religiosity,” devoid of all anthropocentric echoes and based on “the miraculous order that manifests itself in nature as well as in the world of ideas.” From this he concluded not only that there was no conflict between science and cosmic religiosity, but that the latter was in fact “the strongest and noblest mainspring of scientific research.” Between the lines, but not to be overlooked, was a statement that, in this sense, Einstein harbored a profound religious sensibility.5

Albert Einstein

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We can find Einstein’s sense of the fundamental importance of religious feeling in scientific work, a sense of the sacred connection in his creative scientific enterprise in his words: The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.6 Einstein’s unremitting search for a unified field theory that would explain all the workings of nature and the universe, never to be realized in his own lifetime, was based on longing and faith. His search was not unlike a religious believer’s vision of universal unity and harmony that may have come to him by way of his Jewish heritage. Like Socrates before him, an “inner voice” spurred him on to give expression through his scientific thought and language to the ordered unity of being. Though he ultimately did accept the findings of quantum physics, he could never give it his whole support because, in that case, he would have had to concede that the central trigger of the universe was chance. Fölsing remarked: He was a visionary who believed that he at least surmised the direction in which the “promised land” should be sought; and he must have regarded it as a kind of intellectual surrender that “chance” which he himself hoped to explain, had simply been elevated into a principle by the champions of quantum mechanics.7 Shortly before his death, in 1955, Einstein wrote to a scientific colleague: If I have learned anything from a long life’s ponderings it is that we are much further from a deeper insight into the elementary processes than most of our contemporaries believe, so that noisy celebrations are not much in line with the real state of affairs.8 The religious impulse in Einstein’s scientific work was also expressed in his basic humanity even though there were instances when he seems to have been less than humane. During the First World War, he contributed to the German war effort. During the 1930s, his sympathy for communism as a counter to Nazism made him blind—like so many other European writers and intellectuals—to the atrocities of the Great Purge. After he immigrated to the United States in 1933, and in response to Nazi aggression and the Holocaust,

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he advocated the use of the atomic bomb and never condemned the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the positive side, Einstein was undoubtedly a pacifist and humanitarian at heart, preaching world peace and, during his last years, world government. His personal attempts to help Holocaust victims, his support of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (without committing himself to Zionism), his plea for a peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs, his speaking out against McCarthyism in the early 1950s, and warning the world against the dangers of a looming nuclear arms race, made him often appear to his listeners more as saint than scientist.9 As he once put it to students on the Caltech campus in 1931: Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods—in order that the creations of our minds shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.10 When Homer long ago sat down to recount the story of Odysseus, for him to invoke the Sacred for his inspiration in the figure of the muse and goddess Calliope, daughter of Zeus was natural. Given the many guises in which the Sacred can make its presence felt in our lives, I find no good reason to question this ancient wisdom that saw a direct connection between sacred inspiration and man’s creative endeavors. Though the forms may differ, no essential difference exists in whether the sacred impulse comes to us by way of artistic inspiration, existential intelligence or scientific genius. In Fölsing’s words: In his later years Einstein saw beauty in the laws of nature. He profoundly believed, with religious fervor, that simple laws existed, and that these could be discovered. Except for a brief phase during his adolescence, he never had any use for the personified God of the JudeoChristian tradition. But even in his younger years, he saw God as the guarantor of the laws of nature.11 Ultimately, Einstein’s cultural and spiritual impact came from a combination of the scientist, philosopher, humanist, poet and visionary. In describing Einstein’s spiritual impact on his social environment, and his ability to trigger “outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria” among a post-World War I warweary population of many different persuasions, Fölsing portrayed Einstein as something of a wise man speaking out of a deep religious experience to a world in the midst of ruins. Lincoln Barnett has, in the context of Einstein’s work, spoken of that remarkable elemental and spiritual affinity between man and the universe, an affinity that Einstein personified:

Albert Einstein

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Man’s inescapable impasse is that he himself is part of the world he seeks to explore; his body and proud brain are mosaics of the same elemental particles that compose the dark, drifting dust clouds of interstellar space; he is, in the final analysis, merely an ephemeral conformation of the primordial space-time field. Standing midway between macrocosm and microcosm he finds barriers on every side and can perhaps but marvel, as St. Paul did nineteen hundred years ago, that “the world was created by the word of God so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.”12


Eleven EDVARD MUNCH’S MADONNA When we think of Edvard Munch (1863–1944), we find it difficult to think of anyone who would have been less likely than he was to harbor any substantial feeling for the Sacred. Perhaps Feodor Dostoevsky, one of Munch’s favorite writers, might come to mind. When we think of Munch, we are reminded of how such a gifted painter and graphic artist, though recognized abroad, failed to find any kind of general artistic acceptance at home until he was half a century old. We must also remember that his beloved mother died when he was five year old. His favorite sister, Sophie, died ten years later when she was only fifteen years old. These deaths in his life gave the final blow to his view of the established Lutheran religion as practiced in Norway and particularly by his religious fanatical father whose desperate prayers to God to save a family stricken with tuberculosis only emphasized the utter helplessness of human beings in the face of a vengeful and tyrannical God preaching love. The problem of a loving God continued to plague Munch’s life, just as it had Dostoevsky’s. Fate’s blows did not stop there. Some members of Munch’s family suffered mental illness. One of his sisters was hospitalized for schizophrenia, Munch himself experienced psychotic episodes which may have been symptomatic of schizophrenia, but which were also aggravated by heavy drinking. He suffered a number of severe nervous breakdowns. The obsessiveness with which he came back again and again to certain depressive themes in his work and the seventy-two self-portraits he painted in his eighty years of life suggest that he may have been repeatedly driven to verify or to confirm the reality of his existence. Munch had troubled relationships with women. Regardless how attractive women were, in his eyes women were always a threat to his creativity. This might have been a partial rationalization of his fear of marriage as a means of propagating mental illness in future offspring. His paintings of women such as The Vampire (1893) and The Beast (1902), and many other such representations in the spirit of his watercolor Self-Portrait: Salome Paraphrase (1898), were hardly complimentary to the opposite sex or indicative of the possibility of any kind of happy or satisfying emotional relationships. We can see Munch’s tragic life mirrored in his bleak and pathological art. His art was mostly desolate and lifeless, without any joy or hope. We get a profound sense of his afflicted imagination in his best works: The Sick Child (1885–1886), Night in Saint-Cloud (1890), Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892), The Scream (1893) and Jealousy (1895).1

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED Munch wrote to one of his artist friends in 1913: I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter . . . . But I do believe that there is a mysterious force that continues, so that we repeat ourselves like crystals that are dissolved and then re-crystallize again.2

For my part, I believe that it was Munch’s intuitive and/or pantheistic sense of this mysterious force or life force at work in our lives, which enabled him to transform the heavy burdens of his tragic life into creative expression. In his painting Madonna (1893–1894), of which he made numerous color prints between 1895 and 1902, he was able to give spiritual expression to his inner feeling of an eternally recurring universal energy that could never be annihilated by death. As Josef Paul Hodin (1905–1995) put it in reference to one of the color lithographs of Madonna: Madonna is one of Munch’s great graphic works . . . . The frame with sperm and an embryo symbolizes the moment when a new life is conceived. The wavy lines round the Madonna’s hair are expressive of the connection of this happening with the life forces of the universe.3 Munch’s Madonna is like an intermediary—a Nordic Hagia Sophia— between the universal, the sacred source of all being, and the bleak world he portrayed in the rest of his work. With the emphatic red halo around her head, she is like a sacred conduit for the universal flow of energy whirling about her like an aura. She may be, at the moment of conception, harboring the potential of life and death, but she is the only ray of hope in the darkness, caught at a moment of profound fusion with the universe. The lines undulating about her, though they carry a faint echo of The Scream (1893), now exude tranquility and peace. She is like a talisman against his somber painting of Golgotha (1900), where Munch represented himself as both Christ and artist crucified amid a mocking crowd.4 Only in one other painting, The Sun (1909–1911), was Munch able to recapture something of the sacred quality of his Madonna.5 This is not to say that a crucial spiritual residue of his Lutheran upbringing did not remain with him all his life. As early as 1889, he had commented on the “holy quality” of his painted humanity.6 Much later in his life, during his sixties, he jotted down the thought that “God is in all /All is in us (God).”7 In thinking of Munch’s life, especially of his tendency toward mental illness, I am reminded of Ronald David Laing’s (1927–) compassionate re-

Edvard Munch’s Madonna

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mark, “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through.”8 In a passage especially relevant to Munch, he wrote: The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of nonbeing into being . . . .9 Perhaps here we finally have a measure for Munch’s life as a painter and of the psychologically and spiritually crucial place that his Madonna occupies in his whole oeuvre.


Twelve JUNG’S UNCONSCIOUS There can be no doubt—even today when we see a distinct backlash to Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) psychoanalytical ideas—that he significantly furthered the exploration into the inner workings of the human subconscious.1 But, if we compare Freud to Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), he was, with all his originality of thought, too caught up in his theoretical methodology, often at the expense of existential human reality. For example, though he could admit that the prohibition in Mosaic religion against the making of an image of God was “a triumph of spirituality over the senses,”2 his psychoanalytical theory boxed him into a terminology of the subconscious which stopped short of any further exploration into the phenomenon of human spirituality. There was no room in Freud’s psychoanalytical system for any sacred principle at work—God was an illusion—and consequently the world of his subconscious was totally defined by the sexual drives of childhood and its adult repressions, suppressions and sublimations.3 Jung, on the other hand, though just as intent on being scientific and empirical, was open to going further. As far as Jung was concerned, religious “belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience.” Yet it was this inner experience of life, what he called the “unconscious” part of human existence that was, “the only accessible source of religious experience.” Though he questioned whether such religious experience came from some divine source, he was prepared to accept the “overwhelming numinosity of the experience” as proof of its incontrovertible genuineness or, in his words, its “absolute certainty.” Nor was he willing, for that matter, to disregard the possibility of a God behind human existence: I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal.4 For Jung the key to the human unconscious and beyond were dreams. Dreams were harbingers of the unconscious: “In any case my experience is in favor of the probability that dreams are the visible links in a chain of unconscious events.” Dreams were also the carriers of archetypes, natural as opposed to cultural symbols, by which Jung meant ancient, primordial collective race memories which could reach our unconscious across eons of time. Surfacing as symbols in dream-shape, they were manifestations of “the God within.” Of the quaternity symbolism in dreams, Jung wrote:

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED It would be a regrettable mistake if anybody should understand my observations to be a kind of proof of the existence of God. They prove only the existence of an archetypal image of the Deity, which to my mind is the most we can assert psychologically about God. But as it is a very important and influential archetype, its relatively frequent occurrence seems to be a noteworthy fact for any theologia naturalis.5

But the real carrier of these archetypal symbols in our dreams was our psyche which was “part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless.”6 As such, the psyche, with its endless reach into the universe, beyond human consciousness, was able to express numinous experiences. Through the modern psyche, the ancient gods took on new, modern shape: But the gods in our time assemble in the lap of the ordinary individual and are as powerful and as awe-inspiring as ever, in spite of their new disguise—the so-called psychical functions.7 In effect, these collective archetypes were “chiefly religious images,” their psychical intent was to “restore our psychological balance,” and in that sense they carried sacred healing power within them: “Myths of a religious nature can be interpreted as a sort of mental therapy for the sufferings and anxieties of humankind in general—hunger, war, disease, old age, death.8 Such psychical or religious experiences were “absolute” and “indisputable.”9 In a world in which modern rational man had lost his “capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas,” in which he felt himself “isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional ‘unconscious identity’ with natural phenomena,” his only hope lay not in “his great religions nor his various philosophies,” but in those psychical archetypes welling forth from his unconscious in dreams.10 As Jung put it once, “I hold that our dream really speaks of religion and that it means to do so.” Another time he wrote: No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses the great treasure of a thing that has provided him with a source of life, meaning, and beauty and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind. He has pistis [ faith ] and peace. Where is the criterion by which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such experience is not valid and that such pistis is mere illusion? Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about ultimate things than the one that helps you live?12 A few years earlier he had already recognized the crucial connection between the sacred and humankind, when he wrote:

Jung’s Unconscious

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I have been accused of “deifying the soul.” Not I, but God himself has deified it! I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul . . . possesses a religious function . . . . It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. For it is obvious that far too many people are incapable of establishing a connection between the sacred figures and their own psyche: they cannot see to what extent the equivalent images are lying dormant in their own unconscious. In order to facilitate this inner vision we must first clear the way for the faculty of seeing. How this is to be done without psychology, that is without making contact with the psyche, is frankly beyond my comprehension.13 Jung had no doubt about his ultimate spiritual findings. A few years before his death he gave an interview in 1955 in which he said the following: All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief—I know that He exists.”14


Thirteen THE SACRED AND TIME Yet the timeless in you is aware of Life’s timelessness. Kahlil Gibran: The Prophet The foregoing chapters have posited a spiritual and sacred connection between human consciousness and its cosmic origins, a connection that I have tried to suggest in a variety of cultural and spiritual contexts. One other context allows us to approach the Sacred: mystic time. In earthly terms, time gives us structure without which all would be chaos. Time is also an essential space in which our mystic imagination may reach out into timelessness. As such, this mystic time is another form of knowledge where time and timelessness are one. As the American psychologist William James (1842–1910) put it: [M]ystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into the depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time. This “mystical susceptibility” to another dimension, William James went on to say, could sometimes be captured in poetry or music, or it could be stimulated in the initial stages of alcohol consumption. But it could also surprise us in totally sober states of mind. A Canadian psychiatrist, Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902), recorded an experience he described as “cosmic consciousness” after having spent an evening with friends discussing poetry and philosophy: My mind . . . was calm and peaceful . . . . All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward, there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe . . . . I saw that the universe is . . . a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life . . . . I saw . . . . that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love . . . . The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during a quarter of a century which has since elapsed.1

We apparently have “time” in order to experience the timeless in us, which is the Sacred, and which some, like the Christian mystic Dionysius the Areopagite, have called the “Darkness”: Unto this Darkness which is beyond Light we pray that we may come, and may attain unto vision through the loss of sight and knowledge, and that in ceasing thus to see or to know we may learn to know that which is beyond all perception and understanding . . . .2 Many ways of experiencing the timeless sense of being exist. Sometimes we can experience something approaching the mystical sensibility through the feeling of love, using nature as metaphor. A few years ago I experienced something of the kind: and love filled our eyes with time stones broke into song and wafts of fragrant herb wild grass and thyme brushed up against us in the summer breeze in the clear southern light and sea gulls skimmed over the water far out of the way . . . love was like stone-white Menesguen, simple and eternal.3 Whether coming to us unbidden like an overwhelming surprise, or coming to us as the experience of some form of artistic expression, mystic consciousness is ultimately the spiritual silence that enters our being. In its inarticulateness, it gives us—be it ever so fleeting—a mystic sense of existence. Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) spoke of this silence in a reference to the Mandukya Upanishad: Of the introvertive mystical consciousness the Mandukya says that it is “beyond the senses, beyond the understanding, beyond all expression . . . . It is the pure unitary consciousness, wherein awareness of the world and of multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. It is the Supreme Good. It is One without a second. It is the Self.”4 Or as the Chinese philosopher and mystic Lao Tzu put it:

The Sacred and Time

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He who knows does not speak; He who speaks does not know.5 I have taken the risk of speaking, mindful of and in agreement with the Jungian psychologist James Hollis’s (1940–) observation, “Because the activity of the psyche is inherently religious it seeks connection, meaning, transcendence.” He further wrote: Life, consciousness and the fearsome journey of the soul all begin with traumatic separation. Connected to the heartbeat of the cosmos, all needs met in the warm, wet world of the womb, we are suddenly thrust onto a cold, spinning planet falling through space and time. We never recover, nor can we ever fully reexperience our sense of participation mystique, our identification with the universe. How much of an exaggeration is it to say that all of our life is spent trying either to recover that lost connection by some form of regressive impulse or to sublimate this deep need into a search for connection with nature, with others, with the gods?6 While we are still earth-bound, we still have time to experience the Sacred by whatever means destiny has placed at our disposal. This is the gift of time. The mystic believes that being “beyond the senses, beyond the understanding, beyond all expression” will bring him or her closer to God. In a much more humble way, we know that our experience in time sometimes allows us a special sense of the Sacred.


Part Two BECOMING PERSONAL FROM THE SPIRITUAL Kenneth A. Bryson If the essence of religion and art could be explained, then both of them would become mere subordinations of psychology. Carl Gustav Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature


Fourteen THE NATURE OF SPIRITUALITY Then God said, “And now we will make human beings; they will be like us and resemble us.” Genesis 1:26 1. Being Human and Becoming Spiritual Persons Human nature, personhood, and spirituality are related concepts. Our first task is to explain their association. Human beings express a dynamic mix of mind and body with rational, spiritual, emotional, physical, and social needs. We become persons by entering into action. All parts of being human play a role in that development. Spirituality is a metaphysical force or tendency. Personhood flows out of human nature in action as the curve of the Sacred lands on good or evil. Spirituality expresses the root of the possibility of the person making process. The processes that animate the spiritual side of being a person arise out of associations formed by an environment, being with others, sharing with them the responsibility of becoming more truly personal. The human response to associations generates a platform for becoming persons. The structure of the “self,” “ego,” “subject” or “I” as center of activity emerges as a being-in-the-making-through-associations. The phenomenological critique of dualism makes abundantly clear the connection between subject and object. The paradox of self-consciousness is that we become more personal as we know ourselves to be part of the whole. The whole generates the part but the part rises above the whole by mirroring it. This awareness raises our spiritual nature into the light of reason. Structure is the result of underlying processes. We have the choice to focus on structure or on processes to elucidate the nature of spirituality. But since structures like “self,” “ego,” or “I” are elusive, we prefer to focus on the processes that generate structure. We are born human but become more truly personal through the interplay of dynamic processes taking place at the level of the environment, other persons, and the central-self. To say that we become more personal through other human beings is not to relegate persons to the level of object, which is but one aspect of being a self. To identify the self with the objects of the world is to let the essential person escape. We become persons through other persons, through other human beings who themselves are becoming more truly personal through similar relationships. The following

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associations are essential to being persons because they function as tributary to the stream of consciousness or the structure of “I”: (1) The environmental associations or the geography of place; (2) The interpersonal associations or personal relationships with other persons and other human beings, including animals; (3) The concrete associations taking place at the level of the “centralself” or consciousness, including reason and emotion. (4) The structure of the “I” or “self” arises out of the awareness of these associations. The process of becoming personal arises out of the parts but generates an entity that is greater than the sum of the parts since it knows itself to be part of the whole, whereas the part knows nothing of this. Person-making arises out of associations that are one time passive and at other times active. We are passive in that the processes generate the structure, but active or self-determining in the sense that the human structure is reflexive awareness in the making (dynamic.) The centralself includes conscious and unconscious processes alike. (5) Spirituality expresses the root of the possibility of reflexive awareness. We are spiritual because we are made in the image and likeness of God.1 Spirituality expresses the root of the possibility of entering into subjective relationship with the sacred—a central element of Abraham religions. In brief, spirituality expresses the metaphysical reply to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” God freely chose to create the world and all things contained in it. Non-theistic metaphysics seeks to explain the why of creation by the how of science and technology. Spirituality animates the possibility of becoming well-adjusted persons—with positive emotions—as we act in harmony with the processes that define us. We become less personal whenever we violate other persons, the environment or the central-self. While all persons are human beings, not all humans are equally personal. We become less personal whenever we act in disharmony with our nature or fail to connect spirituality with person-making capabilities. How does this work? The connection between being human and being a person suggests that the image and likeness of God in human nature sends us on an errand towards the divine image. Being a person arises as a process of acting out the divine likeness towards the divine image. The root of the possibility of acting out the divine image exists in a spiritual nature. Human beings are born spiritual while acting spiritually generates personhood. The human intellect is an expression of the divine image. We are rational beings that become personal by acting towards the divine. We do this on the installment plan, one act at a time, in the immediacy of a concrete


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present. The intellect guides our choice of ways to act in harmony with the divine image. We are born human but become more personal as we use reason and emotion to perform acts in harmony with the divine image in us. Spirituality is passive and active. The distinction that Thomas Aquinas established between the agent intellect and the passive intellect illustrates the movements of spirituality. In the first movement of knowledge, the spiritual intellect is dormant, designed to move but not actually moving until specified by its object. Once specified, the spiritual intellect leaps into action by transposing spirituality into its objects. The two movements of reason correspond to the two aspects of spirituality. The (Thomistic) agent intellect moves into action through specification by the object. In a similar vein, human beings become persons through the specifying focus of other persons, environment, and the subjective life. Spiritual activity consists in empowering others, the environment, and the central-self. We can also choose to be disempowering towards others, the environment, or ourselves. We can put the spiritual tendency on a bad diet, not just on a good diet. We will look at these possibilities later. The process of becoming more personal is a two way street. First, we are the output of associations. Second, we manifest spirituality in what we do. We have adopted the language of a person-making process to emphasize that being human is a verb, not a noun. We are human beings that become persons. Human beings are spiritual to become persons. To be spiritual means that God has made us in His image and likeness. The concepts—human nature, being personal, and spirituality work hand in hand. To provide additional detail on the person-making process we can begin with the first range of associations or relations that defines us as they develop in the central-self, which encompasses the world of thought, feelings, memories, and imagination, and both conscious and unconscious processes. The second range of associations that characterize the person-making process takes place at the level of the social-self or within our relationships with other human beings. The social-self is an essential—not accidental or superficial— dimension of being personal. I base my view on an inverted Cartesian premise that others exist before I exist. The view of René Descartes that pulls the existence of other minds or the world of extension out of the thinking thing is plainly in error. We are nothing social in the absence of other human beings. To form an essential attachment with others is to view the self and other humans as forming an inseparable unit. We are not outside others looking at others. We are those very social beings seeking to understand the self in the light of others. The other is an extension of me as I am an extension of others. We form an inseparable unit. The claim that the self can exist without the other is an illusion modeled on Descartes’s false belief in the primacy of the thinking thing.

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Martin Heidegger’s observation that the thing-in-itself is really two things fused into a discernible whole expresses the problem with Descartes’s reductive view. The thing-in-itself, according to Heidegger, refers neither to the existence of consciousness nor to the existence of an object outside of consciousness, but to a mode of being superimposed upon the two in such a way as to make encounter possible. Consciousness is the subjective correlate of that encounter while the object of understanding is the objective correlate. The two form an inseparable unit. To call the one into doubt is to cast the whole of that epistemic enterprise into nothingness. The social-self is the epistemic equivalent of that proposition. We cannot maintain the existence of an isolated center of interiority in the absence of other human beings. The third arm of the person-making process is the world of objects. We are the output of relations or associations taking place in nature or the environment. The human body is an integral part of a person’s environment, though it signifies the organic component of a life that is indissolubly spiritual and material. Human development takes place on the arms of the personmaking process as the individual advances through life stages. We move from being human or created in the likeness of God, to becoming personal by acting towards the image of the divine in human nature. The movement towards the divine image expresses the ground of holistic healing, and the disciplinary perspectives of theology, psychology, philosophy, and religion towards the sacred. Spirituality is broader than religion. While it appears inappropriate to think of authentic religion without including a reference to its spiritual base, we can conceive of authentic spirituality without imaging a religious connection. Spirituality expresses the metaphysical condition of being religious. In the absence of an authentic religious connection, the healing focus shifts to alternate modes of reconnection by music, art, literature. They become pseudo religious activities in the absence of spiritually based religion. Lived experience provides a decisive test to determine the legitimacy of a religious connection. While lateral spiritual connections can exist side by side to augment the ecstasy of a religious connection, they can also lead to emptiness as a failed attempt to replace religion. The need to belong to something greater than self characterizes the secular manifestation of spirituality. Music, poetry, dance, touch therapy, yoga, and meditation function as an end in themselves instead of as a means to a religious connection. According to Robert Buckman we are programmed to pursue the good life: I sincerely believe that all of us have an element inside us that allows us to recognize ethical acts, other people’s genius, inspiration and the finer qualities that humans possess. I call that essence spirituality.2


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He traces this internal element to an activity of the right frontal lobe. The activity generates culturally specific meaning. This explains why the expressions of spirituality do not equally move us. This does not come as a surprise given that the elements of person-making are relative to culture. The Buddhist world for spirituality is shamatha (tranquil abiding), which corresponds to the logic of the non-ego state. Eastern cultures think differently from Western cultures; one culture moves inwardly from the associations to the “ego” and God while the other moves away from the “ego” through the associations to the All of existence. The cross-cultural focus of spirituality as a loving tendency promotes mind-body unity, or seeks to avoid division or disunity. The spiritual tendency is rooted in a cultural tradition. Thoughts and feelings filter spiritual connections. The rituals we use to express our religious connections, for instance, use symbols that make sense in a given culture but not across cultures. While the chanting taking place in East Indian culture opens the right brain to the healing effects of left-brain symbols and rituals, those same sounds would not produce healing in people outside that culture. The distinction between normative and factual connectors allows for the introduction of cultural beliefs into our moral propositions. Cherished values always drive beliefs, though they are not obvious to everyone. William James makes the point in his influential work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, that we are often blind to one another’s values and beliefs. Values drive beliefs, but beliefs govern behavior and emotion. We can perceive emotion to be negative whenever we fail to understand the nature of the values that animate beliefs. Our study into the ways of spirituality is factual, not normative. We do not suggest that spirituality needs to connect with this or that venue to be productive (to move us towards the divine image, or Higher Power) since we are mainly interested in developing the factual psychological claim that a generic trans-cultural loving spiritual tendency finds many homes. We think that if we could invite the different cultures of the world to sit at a central table, we could go a long way towards ending the differences that separate us by focusing on shared values. James is right to call attention to “the blindness in human beings,” but we can make an equally strong case for how alike we are in the spirit. The environmental arm of the person-making process recognizes the geography of place as an essential component of the human act. The human act embeds itself in the concrete world of extension. The fetus, for instance, traces early developments to an inherited genetic structure. The cells of the zygote add and divide in the mother’s uterus. This is the fetus’s environmental arm, specifying body type, health condition, or genomic predisposition as an essential character of a person-in-the-making. The geography of place is an integral part of the fetus’s person-making process. Science supports this claim. Pathik D. Wadhwa’s research found that the maternal environment exerts a significant influence on the fetal neurode-

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velopment relative to recognition, memory, and habituation.3 The character of a human being’s first years of life is determined by inherited DNA, which determines both bodily characteristics such as eye color and general health, and personality and intellect. This is not to suggest that we can reduce personality and intellect solely to neurological activity, but to acknowledge that thinking and personality cannot take place outside the human brain— environmental arm of becoming human. The geography of place extends to the whole of the extended world, including the city, street, house, and room where the child lives. At some point, the child develops into a mature individual capable of controlling some aspects of its environment. I can choose to live in this or that part of town, move to a different city, or even a different country. In our day, the control we have over the human environment extends to genetic engineering or to the kind of bodily characteristics that we want to obtain for our children. Some of these choices are not always wise or in the child’s best interest. They carry the responsibility for ethical choices that respect the child’s autonomy, privacy, confidentiality, beneficience, and choices about justice and the use of scarce medical resources. We can unwittingly choose to disempower someone by rushing to do something only because we have the technological capacity for doing it. While examining the complex bioethical issues that arise out of genetic screening and genetic engineering is beyond the scope of this chapter, the consensus opinion favors moving slowly. Technological choices can lock us into undesirable consequences. The vision of spirituality as a loving tendency towards God raises the question of how the relationship with the divine affects us. What do we do for the sake of God? Theists believe in the sacred character of the world and all things contained in it. They believe in the sanctity of the planet as a living system. Some atheists also believe in the sanctity of all life, including the planet. The spiritual tendency is evident in theists and atheists alike. That we act spiritually in this world is a given condition of existence, though Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” moves us to celebrate life on heterogeneous altars. I recognize my fundamental insignificance and dependence on God. I share with you a responsibility towards my neighbor, here and in developing countries. We need to overcome world hunger, thirst, respiratory problems, malaria, diarrhea, and oppression. Atheists join in the same venture because their intellect applied to moral matters assures them that this is the right thing to do. All life is sacred, but the current economic agenda drives 20 percent of the world’s population to consume 80 percent of the world’s resources. This leaves the majority of people of the world without the necessities of life. I believe that we should help one another because I think that our spiritual tendency moves us in that direction. God is on the side of love and good, as is the human intellect. This view explains my behavior, though others can share


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a similar concern for the developing countries without sharing my value that a loving God creates the world. 2. The Heart of Being The love of God is manifest in being’s unconcealment. The tree in my back yard speaks to me. It sends me on an errand to discover the truth about itself. I take my tools with me wherever I go; the tools of a philosopher, theologian, scientist, and artist help me carve an idea of the tree. The philosopher makes distinctions, defines terms, examines assumptions, reduces the complex to the simple, maintains internal consistency, and asks, “Why there is something rather than nothing?” The theologian thinks of the tree’s outstretched arms reaching towards God. The scientist talks about carbon atoms, and the artist writes about the tree’s beauty in iambic pentameters. We write about these truths in learned journals and meet to talk about them in learned societies. The tree chuckles as we distort the meaning of being. The tree laughs aloud when it hears the mind flapping over the merits of a rationalist who would be his own tree. The tree groans as empiricism reduces it to the sensate world. David Hume’s problem with necessary connections suggests he is not sure how long this conversation can go on. It worked in the past but he cannot assume that the future will be like the past. Immanuel Kant’s a priori counters Hume’s skepticism and saves the tree from the pulp mill. The tree groans and sobs because no one is listening. Why not let me speak for myself, says the tree? The phenomenologist agrees. Back to the tree says Edmund Husserl, back to the tree before all this mind flapping distorted the nature of the organic errand. We set up an altar to the tree. We make the intelligibility of the tree a gift from God—a religious reconnection. We assign it primacy and remind others that Aquinas always knew about this primacy. Thomists busy themselves with distinctions between concepts and ideas, telling us that the primary operation of knowledge introduces us to the being of the tree and not the mind flapping about the tree. After all, ideas are for that. Jean-Luc Marion goes wild. He celebrates the great love the tree has for us, an undying and very gratuitous celebration of God’s love for us. The tree provides an answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I am God‘s gift to you, says the tree. I am a gift because my existence is indemonstrable—here is something given directly to your consciousness before consciousness knows itself to be conscious! I am a gift to consciousness, says the tree, proof that something exists rather than nothing. The existence of a world outside consciousness is indemonstrable. Yet, it commands spontaneous assent and provides an answer to the question ‘why something rather than nothing;’ Things are! The answer is that God invites us to become aware that we stand in the presence of mystery (the indemonstrable

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world.) The existence of the world is God’s extended hand to us—an invitation to enter into relationship with God. The tree exerts primacy over us, freely, lovingly, giving itself to all. The tree is an equal opportunity dispenser of truth. We bring our appetites to the tree—sonnets, love, and chainsaws to the banquet of God’s love. How unselfish is the tree to admit philosophers, theologians, poets, and pigs to the same banquet of truth. The tree never sends itself on errands because it lays down the ontological ground of the possibility of truth, the possibility that you and I have, and continue to receive for running errands. The tree sends me on a pilgrimage to God. A danger of going too far exists in the use of metaphors, of doing for the tree what Descartes did for the thinking thing. We run the risk of raising the tree’s primacy to a place it cannot defend. The tree is not conscious, though it secures the ground for the possibility of consciousness. Consciousness cannot function without its object. We tell the tree that we are co-creators of errands. We ask it to swallow the same pill Descartes had to swallow. We remind the tree that we are in communion with it. The tree sends no errand in the absence of conscious, intelligent, runners. We establish a partnership between mind and things. The partnership values the correlates of truth, the one subjective, and the other objective. This is what Heidegger meant when he said that the thing in itself is not the tree, nor is it consciousness, but a mode of existence superimposed upon the two in such a way as to make knowledge possible. The phrase the ‘epistemic genealogy of knowing trees’ comes to mind. This means that God created trees and human beings to pursue the divine image together. Trees do it naturally. We do it through reason and emotion. I select my agenda and prioritize my errands. I have a history and horizon, a bag full of environmental, social, psychological ways of looking at my instructions. I read my tree instructions as a philosopher, theologian, scientist, and artist. The tree sends me on an errand to find God. The mystery of existence does not move everyone equally. Martin Heidegger expresses the utmost reverence for the being of things, but he does not take the existential leap into God’s existence. Heidegger uses the German word unverborgenheit (unconcealment) to suggest that being functions as a verb instead of a noun. While the tree’s intelligibility sends us on an errand to discover its truth, it also conceals truth from us. We see the world through the finite portals of space and time. We would have chemistry at a bargain to think that the tree shows the whole of itself to us at a single glance. Other possibilities exist to replace my God choice. The scientist prefers to wait and see, unmoved by my choice of dance. The effort to decipher environmental associations takes place on the installment plan—one act of truth, one dance, at a time. The search for truth is an ongoing activity. Heidegger cannot answer the question, “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” Maybe the tree does not show itself in the same way to everyone. Perhaps my spiritual


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needs frame the way the tree discloses itself to me. The phenomenological analysis of the thing-in-itself suggests as much. Heidegger and I, if I may be so bold as to put myself in his company, agree that the ultimate root of the possibility of standing in the presence of being’s unconcealment is a given. I recognize this as a spiritual opportunity to invite the Almighty to enter my life. Heidegger might agree that the activity is spiritual but does not consciously direct it toward God. We need to move beyond metaphysics to justify the possibility of doing metaphysics. The belief in God’s existence is not one of the values that Heidegger brings to the philosophic table. Still, he expresses a great deal of concern for being. That concern leads him to examine the being of the questioner. He questions why the meaning of being fascinates us. It seems to me that Heidegger is wondering about the nature of spirituality. He expresses a deep respect for nature and a concern for the ways in which modern technology can disempower the environmental connection. Heidegger says that we are moving out of a need to possess and control nature. He would agree that seeing nature as “standing in reserve” for us is wrong. What is that concern if not an expression of the spiritual? In ancient technology, we depended on the windmill and the water wheel to do work. We waited for nature to do work. The absence of wind and rain meant the absence of work. Modern technology changed the relationship we have with nature. It transformed our spiritual roots from respect for being to control of being. Good technology suggests the hegemony of “letting be.” Good agricultural technology, for instance, uses crop rotation to restore nutrients to the soil. Greed and the profit motive often drive the use of modern technology. This is an instance of spirituality gone sour as it puts the planet in peril. Heidegger’s attempt to reverse the trend is highly spiritual. Aquinas develops a metaphysics based on the primacy of being. The focus arises out of his belief that God created the world and all things contained in it. It follows that the existence of a world outside consciousness is indemonstrable. His view offers confirmation that the person is the output of a person-making process. The world is already there before the first act of intellection takes place. He gives us the distinction between the concept and the idea to safeguard the objectivity of knowledge. If, in the first operation of knowledge, he says, the mind knows its mental contents, then, the claim to objective knowledge is absurd. The mind will know its flapping about things rather than the being of things. The role of the Thomistic concept is to provide a mechanism for the presence of the being of things in the intellect before the activity of knowing begins. We develop ideas, on the other hand, as mechanism to produce something to its likeness of concepts. The idea functions as an exemplar of the thing known. The concept is what allows the being of things to manifest its presence in consciousness. The idea is what allows consciousness to grasp the being of things, as it exists in itself, without distortion

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from consciousness. The acts of perception and thought would otherwise distort the being of that which shows itself to consciousness. Mystics stand shoulder to shoulder with Aquinas in the presence of being. They see God at work. Perhaps Heidegger does too. They possess an intuited knowledge of the sacred, an insight that exists beyond the knowledge of sense and intellect. Being drives us to know the nature of the manifest. The journey takes the mystic Florence Nightingale to a search for God within the folds of self where she finds a source of energy to help others. She sees beyond the narrowing parameters of reason where she finds God in other people. Although being sends us on an errand, it does not disclose the whole of itself to reason. To think that the first glance reveals the whole of God in others would be mysticism at a bargain. Instead, we probe the presence of divinity in others one social action at a time. This vision generates compassion for life. It feeds the soul and generates energy to paint, write, sing, or the desire to put the experience to music. The mystical vision feeds us as we seek but never completely succeed in emptying the contents of the intuited insight onto the blank page of a canvas or manuscript. The spiritual desire to celebrate the unity, truth, goodness, and beauty of the tree of experience animates poetry. The tree’s intelligibility excites us and we feel the need to tell that story in books, put it on canvas, write poetry, love neighbors, and we feel the spiritual need to respect the environment. Poets, artists, and musicians succeed as they create immortal odes that feed spiritual appetites across the centuries. We sometimes fail and are capable of horribly heinous crimes against other people. Some of us die full of twisted spirituality. In what is perhaps his greatest insight, William Carlo celebrates the triumph of Thomistic metaphysics by arguing, not only the primacy of being, but also the reducibility of essence to existence in existential metaphysics.4 His view stands as a powerful critique of essentialism or rationalist metaphysics wherein thought of being substitutes for the reality of things. He sets the details in the dispute between Gillis of Rome and Henry of Ghent concerning the distinction between God and creatures. He argues that the distinction between essence and existence allows us to distinguish between God who exists necessarily and his creation that does not. If this is the case, says Gillis of Rome, essence will exist before the creative act, which is contradictory. The solution to the problem exists outside the realm of eternal forms in a reduction of essence to existence. Essence and existence function as reciprocal causes of being. Carlo uses the analogy of water becoming ice to explain how existence contains essence: Let us consider existence as if it were a liquid poured from this same pitcher simultaneously with a sudden drop in temperature. Under freezing conditions, it becomes a solid before it strikes the ground. The liquid existence is possessed of its dimensions, its own limitations. The shape it


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assumes is the determination of its own substance. Essence is not something extrinsic to existence which limits and determines it in the way that a pitcher shapes its recipient liquid, but essence is rather the place where existence stops.5 The primacy of being opens the door to God’s communion of self through the person-making process. The “I” is ultimately reducible to being’s intelligibility, lending support to the Eastern claim that we belong to the whole of existence.6 We come from God through being and return to God through a reclaim in being. The argument develops on two complementary explanations of human death. First, we look at death as being the absence of consciousness (whole brain death.) Second, the metaphysical structure of human death suggests an explanation that moves on both sides of being. To die is to suffer a gradual loss of consciousness, but to be dead is to face a reversal in the ultimate root of the possibility of consciousness. Human death is being’s refusal to be for consciousness. Human death stands as the ultimate critique of rationalism, defrocking the pretentious view of consciousness as superior to being. We die because being says so. Being expresses the possibility of being spiritual. Perhaps we can continue Carlo’s existential metaphysics to add that human spirituality arises at the place where being for us ends. This interpretation of spirituality explains the problem of personal identity in the afterlife state (I do not attempt to justify belief in the existence of an afterlife state.) Thomas Aquinas explains human death as the departure of the soul from the body. The challenge is to explain how that can be me as disembodied entity. For as long as I am alive, I exist as an embodied being. The body is not an accidental, superficial, or shell-like structure to house the soul. To say that a person is a dynamic unit of mind and body is to affirm the parts are not separate from the whole. Aquinas is intent on the resurrection of the body because by his own admission we are less personal without the body. The creedal belief does not explain what the dead do until the resurrection. Can they act without a body? The belief does not explain the age and state of the risen body. Will the dead arise with fully developed adult bodies? Would adults who died at an advanced age be resurrected as someone younger than the age at which they died? If so, what would happen to the knowledge we acquired in the interim between that younger age and the age at which we first died? What would happen to individuals who died as infants or young children? Would they rise up at some optimum adult age? The person-making process solves this problem. If the “I” is the output of associations, the soul bears the individuating imprint of a terrestrial existence. Habit accompanies the soul on the journey to the afterlife state. My being individuates my spirituality. This environmental component is one of the determinants that characterize my personal identity. The essential

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thing is that the laws and patterns of concrete existence forge the character of spirituality. The separated soul depends on this individuation to maintain personal identity in the afterlife. All things come from God and return to God through being at human death. Big bang science offers evidence in support of such a claim. How is this possible? The principle of sufficient reason cannot move beyond the realm of the visible measurable universe. The answer to the question why does something exist rather than nothing comes from this side of being’s intelligibility. Scientists estimate that the process began twelve to fifteen billion years ago out of an explosion (big bang) that followed fixed laws and patterns to arrive at a point where the planet earth could support human life some three and one half billion years ago. While we cannot move beyond the observable world to observe what things were like before the big bang (without violating the principle of sufficient reason), science suggests that the big bang happened out of the nothing. Some philosophers suggest that the nothing must contain intelligence since it generates the laws and patterns of expansion (as Albert Einstein pondered, how does the universe knows to follow laws?). Edwin Hubble’s (1889–1953) discovery in 1929, that the light from distant planets is growing brighter (the red shift) suggests that the universe is continuing to expand, pulling space and time inside itself as it unfolds. This means that the universe must have been infinitely dense at the point of origin. It must have existed without mass since any extension requires space and time. Infinite density is equivalent to the nothing. If the universe had size, it would not be infinitely dense. The point of infinite density must be equivalent to nothing at all. This proves that the big bang must have taken place in the nothing. Yet, the universe unfolded in accordance with intelligent laws and patterns. The nothing expresses the laws of existence (being’s intelligibility.) Heidegger’s inaugural lecture “What is Metaphysics?” at the University of Freiburg in 1929, examines the status of the nothing that envelops being. It must be something, he says, because being would not exist without it. It seems possible to think about human existence in that same light. Human death is a return to the nothingness that surrounds the big bang origin of the cosmic environment. The second sets of relationships that individuate persons arise out of the social-self. We claim to be a self as the output of interpersonal relations beginning with a family of origin (mother, father, brother, sister) extending to include friends, and neighbors. The immediate family is first to teach the importance of values, love, and compassion in the spiritual life of a person. Social relationships equally provide a locus for the development of negative emotions as we learn the language of hate, resentment, envy, from others. They teach us about self-centeredness, pride, dishonesty, and fear. We return hostility or hate as we view others through the tortuous eyes of such emotions. As we cocreate a world at war together, we treat them as an extension of ourselves.


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The social-self also moves out of a genetic predisposition to disease. Children of mothers with histories of substance abuse, mental illness, and trauma are at-risk for these same disorders. Studies show that alcoholics and their non-drinking offspring have verbal and language skills deficits as compared with the general population.7 Alcoholics have poorer social skills than their nonalcoholic counterparts do. A study by N. VanDeMark, L. Russell, M. O’Keefe, N. Finkelstein, C. Noether, and J. Gampel found: Children exposed to parental substance abuse, mental illness, and violence face profound challenges, including increased risk for emotional and behavioral problems, substance abuse, and victimization.8 E. Dejin-Karlsson and P. O. Ostergreen, two researchers from Malmo University, Sweden, confirmed the view of the social origins of the self. They found that psychosocial resources (and lifestyle habits) during pregnancy affect the risk of having a small-for-gestational age child.9 Gabriel Marcel provides a wonderful approach to the philosophy of the social-self. His penetrating use of phenomenology generates what can be termed an intentionality of subjects or necessary association between subjects of experience. The affective component of intersubjectivity provides details on the essential connection that exists between persons. He finds that we reach God or hell through one another. He introduces us to a personal absolute, one that shares our sorrows, joys, and celebrations. His vision of embodiment introduces the spiritual ways of the social. The body, he says, is not something I have or possess. I am my body. He extends that relationship to others. The other is not an object for me. The other is an extension of me. We enter into spiritual communion with the other. The spiritual exegesis of intersubjectivity includes the associations we share with others at large. Twelve-Step programs build on this insight, as individual recovery from dependence is contingent upon the identification occurring between group members. Spirituality animates the dialogue between individuals in recovery. The central-self arises as the output of associations taking place in the world of thoughts, feelings, conscious, and unconscious processes alike. The language of spirituality includes the logic of the heart and the ways of reason. The heart knows spiritual truths that feed the life of reason. The spiritual lesson that Jesus taught us, for instance, is to love our neighbors. The intellect can figure out ways of doing this, a spirituality imbedded in the human heart drives the message to do so. We strive to be loving, forgiving, compassionate, caring, nurturing people, though we often fall short of that mark. The personmaking focus is on the spiritual progress that arises out of shifting or rearranging all our defining relationships.

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The three arms of the person-making process construct the spiritual self. We are born human but become more personal as we strive to institute and vary our relationships. The process of becoming spiritual is active and passive depending on the come and go of associations. We receive spirituality from God’s presence in other persons, the environment, and the ways of the human heart. We dispense spirituality as we become aware of ourselves, and enter into relationships with other persons and the environment. 3. Spirituality as Loving Tendency Spirituality is as a loving tendency towards God or a Higher Power. Each word in this simple declarative sentence is vital. Satan is pure spirit, though unloving. That is why Satan is a “Prince of Darkness,” on a mission to divide and destroy being. The desire to pursue the good drives human spirituality, though we can throw bad choices at our existential restlessness. Selfishness, greed, lust, for instance, is divisive. Being spiritual is a process, not an event. We become more spiritual as we continue to act towards the divine image. Spirituality discloses a subjective and an objective tendency. Human nature expresses a natural tendency toward the good, though the choice of good is subjective, relative to intellect and appetite. The subjective nature of spirituality suggests that we often fill the spiritual tendency with unproductive connections. In these cases, we act towards the fragmentation of self (disunity.) The spiritual nature of being human is not unlike the Thomistic Agent intellect, as denoting the readiness of the intellect to engage the data of the external and internal senses. Neuroscience is producing evidence that the limbic system or right frontal lobe in particular is the main headquarters for spiritual, religious, mystical, artistic activities, and other complex visions. The Apostle Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus or the “Joan of Arc” type experience provides an illustration of a typical right temporal lobe activity. Buckman found: The structure of the human brain is such that experiences of God and heaven are hardwired into it. Our brains lead us to readily undergo experiences that we have chosen to call God, spirituality, oneness with the universe, or simply words and names.10 Such experiences can be generated artificially by stimulating the right frontal lobe with an electrical probe, or experientially as is purportedly the case in reports of communications from God, the dead (near-death experiences), ghostly experiences, and other paranormal experiences. Buckman says that not everyone claims to have such experiences because we express different threshold levels or sensitivity to events. Individuals who claim to be in communication with God are more aware of God’s presence, or their spirituality,


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than others might be. Buckman adds that the experience of God might be an illusion, as the awareness that God exists is not a proof of that existence. He argues that the temporal lobe sensitivity tells us something about how the brain works, nothing more. His study is factual, not normative. Poets, mystics, and fortunetellers alike have a right temporal lobe frequency attuned to that sort of activity. Others have the same temporal lobe without displaying evidence of that configuration. Lunatics might trace their belief that the moon is made of cheese to an epileptic turn of their right frontal lobe. The data tell us something about programming of the brain to interpret the world, nothing about the reality of this world. While Buckman does not interpret the data to confirm or dispute the authenticity of the spiritual experience, he does not discount it. His study provides an explanation of the neurological mechanism that appears to be at work in spiritual experience. He appears to offer it as an investigation into the psychological principles that accompany belief in the existence of God. He says that the same energy generates the production of artwork. What are we to make of this? We cannot disregard the distinction between belief and reality. We might agree with Kant’s rejection of Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument because existence is not a predicate or property. The thought of God as a “being greater than which none can be conceived” is not a legitimate proof that God exists. Still, the ontological argument continues to fascinate and attract support. The logical premise that nature does not act in vain leads us to wonder why the structure and layout of the human brain works as it does. Why do humans search for experiences of God and of heaven? William James invites us to judge the legitimacy of such metaphysical beliefs by their beneficial effects. Given that the beneficial effect of believing in God is the promise of a better world, the God of faith and the God of the right frontal lobe might not be in conflict after all. The neurological structure of the frontal lobe prepares the mother to express love for her child. The mother’s spiritual expressions of love, care, and concern generate a fetus’s front line for social contact with the world. It prepares the way for the child’s ongoing social development. The next level of spiritual existence arises as the child matures and learns to move out of selfish concerns to recognize the need everyone has for love. We might say, others love, therefore, I am. At that stage, spirituality acts as a psychological tendency. It animates the expressed need we have to move towards life, to shape ourselves which means to shape the associations that define us or lead us to become more truly personal. The psychological character of spirituality as tendency is factual as opposed to normative. The word spirituality is from the Latin word spiritus, meaning breath. The Greek word for breath, pneuma, refers to soul or spirit. The spiritual tendency suggests that we instinctively resist destruction as we push our associations to life. The character and shape of personhood depends upon our moral choices. We act for the good life. We seek happiness. The

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spiritual tendency seeks to rearrange life, defining associations in order to maximize quality of life. We shift and rearrange environmental setting to ensure an optimum geography of place. We shift and rearrange our social environment as we mature and become more personal. We seek to grow in wisdom as we read, travel, and reflect on the meaning of life. The subjective internal vision of the spiritual life evolves as we act from the likeness of God towards the image of God in psyche. Spirituality as a loving tendency towards God or Higher Power pushes us towards becoming whole. Unity is a sign of perfection. Disunity or division is a sign of imperfection. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex problem, the distinction between illness and disease helps us to gather clearer visions of spirituality. Disease refers to a division in our biological organism. The goal of the health care team is to cure the patient or restore the individual to biological unity. Illness, on the other hand, refers to a division between mind and body. In the beginning, medicine focused on healing and on curing the patient. In the sixteenth century, the age of science spearheaded a shift towards curing only. Doctors treated the patient as a biological organism instead of as a person. Though we have made great strives in medicine and have extended life expectancy by some thirty-five years over the past hundred years, the focus on wellness appears to play a vital role in our extended lifespan. What is the point of living longer in the absence of a better quality of life? The goal of medicine since 1985 has been to heal and cure the patient. In palliative care, the goal shifts away from finding a cure for the disease to healing the mind-body connection. We find the clearest expression of that movement in spiritual care.11 Healing enlists all components of a person’s life, environmental, social, and subjective. Margaret Burkhardt and Mary Gail Nagai-Jacobson express the unitary character of spirituality with a hologram. That metaphor seems especially appropriate to illustrate how spirituality works because the part of a hologram reflects the whole. They say, “If any place of a hologram is illuminated with coherent light, an image of the entire hologram is provided.”12 We can observe the state of spiritual development (and meaning seeking profile) on the arms of the person-making process: associations about care or pollution of the environment, associations of love or disrespect of other persons, and associations generating negative or positive emotions in the central-self. Many people confuse religion and spirituality. Religion expresses an objective and a subjective perspective, namely, religare and relegere. The Latin word religare means to reconnect or to bind (ligo). The objective face of religion presents as a body of organized culturally based beliefs, symbols, prayers, exercises, and rituals used by a faith community to connect with the Sacred (God, Higher Power, Buddha, and Allah.) People come together in the name of religion because they want to be ethical. No religion overtly seeks evil or to harm anyone. Religious people believe in the existence of an after-


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life state, though the exact nature of this state is relative to culture. The subjective component of religion (relegere) refers to the relationship itself, to the individual’s subjective relationship to the objective law. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) uses the term den Enkelte or “purity of heart” to characterize the best possible relationship. The “hero of faith” in that regard is Abraham because he obeyed God’s commandment to slay Isaac. Kierkegaard says that God used Abraham’s suffering to raise Abraham above objective truth into subjective relation with Him. When God saw that Abraham was willing to risk everything for Him, He spared Abraham’s son. By risking everything for God, he gained eternal life. The two components of religion are crucial to the religious life, though truth as subjectivity is the best fit for spirituality. Carl Gustav Jung raises spirituality and religion into the domain of psychoanalysis. This suggests that spirituality and the subjective aspect of religion translate into a search for meaning. Psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious or the effects of the unconscious on consciousness, springs to life when life loses its meaning. William James views the focus of (subjective) religion from an integrative perspective as the expression of a desire to fit the pieces of life experience into a meaningful whole. The faithful are made whole—individuated, or given hope—by entering into a personal, loving, relationship with the Sacred. The subjective relationship with the Sacred promotes individual healing. Organized religion, from the perspective of objectivity, brings like-minded people together to express a common belief. Scholars, ensuring that they meet the criteria of critical thinking, scrutinize the texts or precepts of organized religion. This endeavor is an essential component of religion, the purpose of which is to expose and denounce the fringe element of paranoia that can find expression in some religious beliefs because subjective truth exists at a sacred place beyond the logic of reason. In the beginning, says the creation story, the cosmos was created whole. Sin and chaos continue to divide creation. The goal of religion is to restore the original unity of creation. Religion is authentic when it accomplishes that goal. Spirituality is the key to successful reconnection. Religion without spirituality or subjective truth is little more than a collection of logical or quasi-logical arguments. Authentic religion (moving out of subjective and objective truth) promotes healing. It serves the function of “spiritual welding” by bridging the gap between body and mind, conscious and unconscious processes alike. The beneficial use of water as a cleansing ritual provides a case in point. Catholics bless themselves with holy water when they enter a church because they recognize their dependence on God. They make the sign of the cross to invite God to enter into communion with them. The river Ganges plays an equally powerful cleansing and healing role in India as the Hindu faithful begin their day by immersing themselves in its holy waters. The chanting, drum beating, dancing, washing, that envelops religious ceremonies world-

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wide, opens the floodgates of right-brain insight and subjective truth so that the healing process can begin. When this fails to happen, the time has come for church to reinvent church, for us to pick up our prayer rugs and move on. The faithful agree to suspend the logic of reason. The spiritual foundations of religious belief exist in the ways of the heart. The rituals and symbols of the church enhance the spiritual unconscious’s ability to apply its creative energies to the healing role. They open wide the logic of the heart, the spirituality of love, forgiveness, and compassion. Religious practices allow reconnection because entering into relationship with the Sacred heals brokenness. Some of our person-making associations express elements of greed, fear, hate, lust, jealousy, revenge, and impotence of the heart. Religion promotes healing by helping the faithful to focus on the emotional monsters of the unconscious psyche, monsters that return to haunt and control daily life. Carl Jung terms the healing process individuation. To individuate is to integrate the contents of the unconscious into the conscious stream of life. For as long as I refuse to accept myself in my weaknesses and failures, unconscious demons control my life. Once I accept myself, as I am, warts and all, then the possibility of healing takes place. Spirituality as loving tendency allows us to identify places in the life of an individual where the search for meaning has taken a turn towards negative emotions. In that event, spirituality moves towards the division of darkness instead of the healing light of God. The Christian story evokes spiritual foundations, a story of healing within a given set of ethical parameters. The faithful of the Abraham religion unite in the spiritual desire to be moral, though they disagree on the particulars. The story opens with the Old Testament narrative of God guiding Jews to the Promised Land. The text changes for Christians as God becomes incarnate through God the Son, but the healing mission is unchanged. The Christian story—a story of salvation made possible by the divinity of Jesus—marks the Christian movement from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Christians believe that Jesus is both divine and human. The crucifixion tells the spiritual story of Jesus broken and dying hung on a cross, left to die and rot after a redemptory act of love. Jesus overcomes the dualism of death as the resurrection story brings light into the darkness of the world. The central point of the story is how healing comes out of brokenness. The ethical particulars change as we move from the Torah, or the Koran, or the Ten Commandments, but the element of subjective truth, spirituality in action, is the same as the faithful seek to enter into personal relationship with the Sacred. The resurrection story promotes healing for Christians as it helps them seek their resurrection, identify places of death or negative emotion in their personal life, places in need of healing. The challenge facing the Catholic Church today, it appears to me, is that the objective ethical elements of religion are not keeping pace with subjective spiritual experience of the people.


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The Catholic Church is marginalizing the healing needs of broken people— the divorced, addicts, homosexuals. We need to realign the subjective and objective components of religion. I understand that this is a big problem and leave it to scholars in religious studies to determine how best to trim the jagged edges of subjective and objective truth to meet the healing needs of spirituality. The impression seems to be that Church is for people who do not need healing. The slow pace of religion to meet the urgent needs of broken people has generated a rush into alternate ways of making spiritual connections. This is not to say that the healing that takes place in nature, touch therapy, dance, painting, music, self-help groups, and literature is unhealthy. Something is wrong if these heterogeneous ways of reconnecting with unconscious restorative energies of the psyche become new-wave religious movements because these techniques function without ethics. Still, they fill a useful role as complementary therapies. We need a both/and approach to healing, not an either/or linear, reductive view of religion. William James offers a promising approach to religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience. His training is in medicine and psychology instead of ethics as such, but he presents a practical rubberneck approach to spirituality as being “the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.” This view recognizes the need to belong to something greater than ourselves which, from a minimalist point of view, is what spirituality is all about. Spirituality as tendency must lead somewhere. I am not sure that “the unseen order of the universe” serves the religious agenda. It might work for Eastern religions, but not Western religions where the invitation is to join a personal deity. Still, James is right about the objective side of religion but not about religion as subjective truth. Spirituality as process leads us on a journey from the seen to the unseen, the visible to the invisible dimension of human existence, but it does so by inviting us to enter into personal relationship with God. The spiritual tendency generates existential restlessness. Saint Augustine of Hippo observes that we are restless for God; our hearts are restless until they find rest in God.13 Existential restlessness animates the search for the meaning of life. Viktor Frankl tells an inspiring story about his experiences in a German concentration camp in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. The book details how spirituality played a role in his survival. He says that love, not brute strength, is the reason some people survived the death camps. Many strong prisoners gave up and died—but the ones who found a reason to live, a higher meaning in life such as love, survived. He found his spiritual meaning in the love he felt for his wife. He knew that she was also a prisoner in one of the camps and though he did not know if she was alive or dead, the thought of her, and the love they shared, kept him going. The Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC) connects love with spirituality. ASERVIC endorses some of the

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same elements I have identified in my philosophical study of spirituality. In writing about the organization, Geri Miller notes: (Spirituality) is the drawing out and infusion of spirit in one’s life. It is experienced as an active and passive process. Spirituality is also defined as a capacity and tendency that is innate and unique to all persons. The spiritual tendency moves the individual towards knowledge, love, meaning, peace, hope, transcendence, connectedness, compassion, wellness, and wholeness. Spirituality includes one’s capacity for creativity, growth, and the development of a value system. Spirituality encompasses a variety of phenomena, including experiences, beliefs, and practices. Spirituality is approached from a variety of perspectives, including psychospiritual, religious and transpersonal. While spirituality is usually expressed through culture, it both precedes and transcends culture.14 4. Spirituality and Medicine The distinction between healing and curing is relevant to an explanation of the spiritual nature of the mind-body connection. Elizabeth J. Taylor, in her Spiritual Care, provides a good summary of nursing care.15 She views spirituality as being a basic innate life principle that leads us to express the search for meaning in the natural and supernatural realms of existence. Her list of spiritual characteristics includes references to self, others, nature, and God/Life Force/Absolute/Transcendent. While I am in essential agreement with Taylor’s nursing view of spirituality, I do not place the transcendent in a separate category of existence. If we do not find evidence for the existence of God or Higher Power in this world, we are not likely to find God anywhere else. The Association of American Medical Colleges offers the following definition of spirituality: Spirituality is recognized as a factor that contributes to health in many persons. The concept of spirituality is found in all cultures and societies. It is expressed in an individual’s search for ultimate meaning through participation in religion and/or belief in God, family, naturalism, rationalism, humanism, and the arts. All of these factors can influence how patients and health care professionals perceive health and illness and how they interact with one another.16 While I am generally in agreement with this view, we should not overlook the dark side of spirituality. Spirituality can function as an agent of division when, for example, it connects with the attempt to control reality through the abuse of alcohol. That sort of spiritual connection promotes disunity in the biological organism (disease), and between mind and body (illness or nega-


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tive emotional states). One of the challenges facing the recovering community is to unhook spiritual energies from negative connectors, especially at a time when the search for ultimate meaning appears to be at an end. The first step to helping others to examine their spiritual connectors (be they positive or negative) is to develop an awareness of how we meet the search for meaning. To that end, I invite my nursing students to keep a spiritual journal to mark how their search for meaning takes them through a spiritual journey. I see this as a key step towards the development of spiritual care. We cannot do for others what we do not do for ourselves. Compassion is a process of using our struggles to become whole as a gateway to the spiritual suffering of the other. This means that a nurse does not need to experience the exact pain of the other to be compassionate. The process of journaling associations between the search for meaning and spiritual connections develops compassion. As nurse and patient identify items that may be blocking spiritual growth, they accomplish holistic healing. We always find these items on the arms of the person-making process. The person-making process allows us to identify pathways to meaning. We accomplish the search for meaning through spiritual welding. The role of the nurse is to help the patient identify lost meaning so that the process of rebuilding meaning can begin in earnest. The nurse functions as facilitator, helping the patient make fresh connections within the interior, the social, and the environmental-self. Journaling, writing, drawing, and story telling are useful techniques in the search for lost meaning. The spiritual tendency generates existential restlessness. John Daniel Wild uses that restlessness as an argument for the existence of God. No series of goods ever satisfies us completely. We need to move on, to press on towards the discovery of fresh layers of meaning. The discovery of meaning functions as a means instead of as an end in itself. Spirituality generates the existential need to continue the search for meaning until we find that ultimate meaning in God. 5. Spiritual Welding The person-making process allows us to identify pathways to meaning. I have developed a series of basic questions, which I use to identify spiritual wellness and the nature of lost meaning in times of illness and disease:

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED Questions concerning the interior self : What gives my life meaning? What values and beliefs are most important in my life? How I feel about myself (at peace, or anxious)? How does my illness change the way I find meaning in life? Do I feel connected to God (Higher Power)? How do I cope with my illness? Is there anything else in this category? Questions concerning the social-self: What relationships are most important to me? Do I have the support of my church community? Is my family supporting me in my illness? Are my friends supporting me in my illness? Do I harbour resentments towards anyone? Do I have a pet? Do I have the support of my work environment? Do I belong to a support group (such as Church, 12-Step group)? Is there anything else in this category? Questions concerning the environmental-self: What I miss most about my home (where I live)? How does my hospital room compare to where I live? Do I miss nature (do I find meaning in nature)? What sorts of meaning do I find there (God, H. P., peace)? What I miss most about nature (the landscape or seascape)? Is there anything else in this category?17

The dialectical movement towards the discovery of ultimate meaning plays itself out in the text of Genesis 1:26: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

Fifteen ACTING TOWARDS THE DIVINE IMAGE 1. Spirituality and Theology We have seen that the intriguing text of Genesis announces that God made us in His image and likeness.1 This chapter develops the argument that the person-making process explains moral development as a spiritual movement from being made in the likeness of God to becoming progressively more aware of ourselves as being made in the image of God. The spiritual nature of personmaking finds its optimum application in the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. The history of the divine image reveals that God is knowable and unknowable. Michael Dauphinais provides an informed study of that history from St. Paul to St. Thomas Aquinas.2 Aquinas identifies the divine image with a human being’s intellectual nature. The image is greater in angels than in us because their intellectual nature is higher. The gift of faith adds to our understanding of God, though in a limited way. The Epistle of Paul to the Colossians claims that the image of God exists perfectly in Christ the Son, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creatures.”3 Given the equality that exists between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the divine image exists perfectly in the Holy Spirit, and in Christ. The connection between likeness and image is possible for us to imagine because of Christ’s dual nature as divine and human. The human side of Christ shows us how to act towards the divine image. What does the reference to “the likeness of God” add to our knowledge of the divine image? Image and likeness appear to be two different things, as Augustine noted, otherwise one word would have sufficed. Aquinas provides two ways of distinguishing between image and likeness.4 In a first sense, likeness is preliminary to image because likeness is more general. In a second sense, likeness is subsequent to image because it signifies a perfection of the image. In this chapter, I will explore the view that suggests we can use likeness to explain image. Aquinas equates the image of God with will and intelligence. To be made in God’s likeness, is to use creative powers to pursue virtue. We pursue virtue as understood by our finite intellect. We gradually develop moral habits. The human intellect understands that an act is morally good, and the will gives the command to use whatever power is required to attain it. The divine image enables us to know when acts are morally good. The divine likeness empowers us to develop moral habits. So, the likeness serves the image. Since

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Aquinas did not wish to separate intellect and will, he used love to express the connection between image and likeness. The divine image connects with our love of knowledge, while the divine likeness affirms our love of virtue. The capability to know and love God is common to all humans. God intended His image to function as an exemplar that we might pursue something to the likeness of the divine image by developing a love of the virtuous life. The likeness of God functions as a means to the attainment of divine wisdom (becoming God like.) Augustine defines wisdom as the worship of God. Aquinas adds that the ultimate end of human action is to know and love God perfectly, a love fully actualized in the beatific vision where we see God face to face. The divine image plays a central role in a person’s spiritual life since it generates a loving existential return to God. The return to the divine takes place in the concrete face of self-consciousness, other persons, and the environment (the imago Dei provides the sacred ontological ground of Thomistic metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics). Although the image of God is mystery, we can gain some insight into the nature of this mystery through a study of the Trinity. A study of Christology makes the connection possible. The Trinity is God’s self-expression. The relations taking place among the divine Persons provide some insight into the inner workings of the Trinity and a sense of what it means to act in the likeness of God. The Father, Son, and Spirit express a relation of love. We know divine love through Jesus Christ. God creates us in His image, but Christ the incarnate Logos teaches us how to act in the likeness of the divine image. This divine action provides the metaphysical ground of salvation. We accomplish salvation through history, which is, as intelligent beings in the world with others, sharing with them a common environment, and the responsibility of civilization. We make use of the distinction between person and human being to express the nature of salvation. While every rational animal is a human being made in the image of God, humans are not equally personal. We become more personal at the output of (loving) relationships taking place at the level of self, other persons, and the environment. Karl Rahner ponders the mystery of the Blessed Trinity and finds that “the dogma of the Trinity is an absolute mystery which we do not understand even after it has been revealed.”5 The distinction between ignoramus (we do not know) and ignorabimus (we will not know) suggests we can still discuss the Trinity in an understandable manner. The study of the Trinity introduces us to two principal treatises. The first concerns the unity of God. The second treatise is on the existence of three distinct persons in God. Aquinas explains that in God exist one nature and three Persons. The text of Genesis 1:26 does not say “let us make man in my image” it says, “let us make man in our image.” Aquinas recognizes that belief in the Trinity of Persons is a matter of faith.6 The text of Vatican Council 11 expresses the profession of faith as follows:


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We believe, therefore, in God, who from all eternity begets the Son, we believe in the Son, the Word of God, who is eternally begotten, we believe in the Holy Spirit, the uncreated Person who proceeds from the Father and the Son as their eternal Love. And so in the three divine Persons who are co-eternal and co-equal with one another, the life and beatitude of God, who is uniquely One, is realized and fulfilled in overwhelming plenitude in the supreme excellence and glory which is proper to him who is the uncreated Being, in such wise that unity in the Trinity and Trinity in the unity must be humbly acknowledged.7 Aquinas’s Treatise on the Trinity opens with a discussion of the “Procession of The Divine Persons.”8 Aquinas’s study provides some insight into God’s inner life. He treats question 27 of the Procession in five articles as follows: The Father Begat the Son. Father and Son are eternal because the Father has always been Father and the Son has always been Son. The Father is the principle of origin. The father’s activity is immanent. The Son is called the Word and is distinct from the Father. The Father and Son are opposites, but necessary relations. The Father could not be Father without the Son. The Son could not be Son without the Father. The relation that exists between them is necessary (substantial). The Father possesses the entire substance of the Son. The Son possesses the entire substance of the Father. The love of Father and Son generates the Holy Spirit. Love is the proper name of the Holy Spirit.9 In the Christian faith, the gift of love is received from the Holy Spirit in baptism (the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and of Mary the Son of God was born.) The procession of the Holy Spirit in God is a vital impulse or movement driven by love. The birth of the Holy Spirit is eternal. The Holy Spirit has always existed. The Holy Spirit is one with the Father and Son. The three Persons are equal in divinity; one divine nature in three Persons. The Father and I are one, says the Lord.10 This is an equality of nature. Jesus also says that the Father is greater than he is, though this text is about the Father’s relation of origin.11 The primary concern, from the point of view of the divine image, is how to make a connection between the Trinity and our pilgrimage towards God. To accomplish this we need to know something about God’s inner life or as Rahner says “we cannot accomplish salvation in the absence of a real ontological relation between human beings and the Trinity.”12 The first chapter of his book, The Trinity, argues that in order to provide an intelligent discussion of salvation we need to place more focus on the Trinity. While the treatise on the unity of God explains how the divine Persons are one God, salvation history, especially the treatise on grace, has to show how we enter into relationship with the divine Persons. Rahner is right to call attention to our “antitrinitarian” timidity.13 He presents Christ as a God-man rather than the incarnate Word as Logos. We misdirect emphasis towards one of the divine Per-

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sons taking on flesh instead of recognizing that this is precisely the person of the Logos! For instance, Rahner regrets the indiscriminate offering of the sacrifice of the Mass in the same manner to the three divine persons. Apparently, we focus on the unity of God and risk losing sight of the role that three distinct persons of God occupy in eschatology. This might be a problem with the use of a word “person” since it denotes a separate center of subjectivity rather than a relationship. I have sought to overcome this problem in my discussion of spirituality by focusing on a distinction between structure (the “I”) and processes (how we become “I”). The approach to “persons” from the point of view of relationships (processes) holds greater promise of accomplishing what Rahner has in mind. Before we consider this view, we need to make some distinctions and clarify the use of other terms. The etymology of explanation suggests that we can explain what we cannot understand. We do so by discovering the sufficient reason of a consequent within the folds of antecedent conditions. We can explain the Trinity by discovering the impact of the Trinity on human life. I assume the existence of a necessary connection between the Trinity and human beings. I think that this belief is established by the existence of two natures—a divine nature and a human nature—in Christ. The basis of a belief in such a connection is in the gratuitous nature of the love God has for us. What is the role of the divine image in a human life? My question—and Rahner’s—is, from the point of view of the connection between spirituality and becoming progressively more personal, what difference does my belief in the existence of the Trinity make in my relationships? The distinction between understanding something and explaining it holds promise, especially in the realm of mystery since we can explain what we do not understand. To understand something is to know it directly in itself, while to explain something is to know it through something related to it, namely, an antecedent sufficient condition. For instance, I do not understand the nature of the Blessed Trinity but I can explain the conditions that surround this mystery. My suggestion is that we can gain some insight into the mystery of the Trinity through an examination of the relevance of the Trinity in a human life. In order to succeed, we need to establish a necessary connection between the divine Persons and human persons. To me, Christ’s dual nature appears to provide this necessary connection. God makes us in His image. Christ, the Son of God, expresses two natures and is, therefore, a necessary connection between the divine Persons and human persons. Two orders exist in Christ, the one natural, and the other supernatural. In the words of Aloysius Janssen, “the natural order is from God and as He is one . . . . The supernatural order is from God and as He is triune.”14 In the divine Person, the union is between the infinite and the finite, while in human persons, the union is between the finite and the finite. Christ


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connects with our finite realm to raise us into the infinite order of existence. He teaches us that to function in the likeness of God is to express the perfection that follows from the divine image. The problem concerning the nature of personhood remains. In Scholasticism, the word “trinity” means a unity of three Persons in one God. Three distinct Persons exist in God, but only one person exists in each human being. We are not persons in the same sense as God. Aquinas, (following Boethius) says in the Summa Theologica that a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. Further, he adds that the name Person applies to God in a special way, “not, however, as it is applied to creatures, but in a more excellent way.”15 Human beings are not made in the perfect image of God. The difficulty had been anticipated by Augustine who said that the attempt to understand something of the Trinity through the mental triad of “personhood”—understanding, memory, and will—cannot succeed because each Person of the Trinity would have his separate understanding, memory, and will: we would no longer have one God. Dauphinais points out: This triad fails as an image of the Trinitarian relations in God because it refers to essential attributes of God, that is, attributes possessed in virtue of his substance, rather than by any of the Persons uniquely.16 This reasoning explains why Augustine said that any understanding of the Trinity from the human point of view was impossible. How, then, is a connection between infinite Persons and finite person possible, if not through understanding, memory, and will? Aquinas roots his answer in the nature of love: The image of God is in man in three ways. First, because man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men. Secondly, because man actually or habitually knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace. Thirdly, because man knows and loves God perfectly; and this likeness consists in the likeness of glory.17 The Trinity of Persons is a perfect expression of love. This is the key to the view of person (divine and human) as output of relationships. Aquinas says that the word Person signifies “relation” when applied to God, “not only by use and custom . . . but by force of its own signification.” Love expresses the essential relation among the divine Persons; “[I]t is the proper name of the Holy Ghost.”18 The terms relation and love express the nature of the image of God. Christians base religion on love and cannot act in the likeness of God in the absence of love. This suggests that loving relations are essential to becoming more truly personal (God like). The view of the person as an independent

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center of interiority is problematic. Rahner’s text proposes that a shift towards personalities solves the conceptual problem.19 Each of the three divine Persons has a distinct way of entering into relationship with creation. This way we can keep sight of the unity of God while recognizing the diversity of personal relationships. The connection between the loving relationships taking place between the divine Persons and human persons is analogical. We are like God (if we can show that we are the output of loving relationships) in ways, but unlike God in our being finite. The view of person as separate center of understanding, memory, and will is more at home in the abstract visualization of being human than in an environment that focuses on the processes that enable us to become personal. The love of virtue and its culmination in the beatific vision suggests that the likeness of the divine image must be pursued in the likeness of divine relations, though in a finite way in a finite environment, and on the installment plan—one loving act at a time. This lays the foundation for the possibility of the beatific vision, as the love Christ has for us raises us into the relations of a Triune God in eternal life. In particular, we imitate divine relations by loving other persons, environment, and self. For instance, the love I have for my wife, neighbor, or environment is not necessary like the love that exists between the divine Persons. Still, the goal is to raise human love to a realm beyond the finite order. Christ makes this possible. I do this concretely, not only by the ways of the human heart, but also in my attitude towards other persons, and the environment. I think that this is what some poets, musicians, artists, and mystics see when they touch the curve of the sacred to celebrate divine. Aquinas finds that the image of God is in us both as regards the Divine Nature and as regards the Trinity of Persons.20 We cannot know the Trinity through natural reason (understanding), but explanation suggests we are engineered by God to act towards the Trinity (in the likeness of God.) The study of human acts taking place in the person-making process must be like the relations of love taking place in the Trinity. Following this line of thought, we can examine “the trinity within ourselves” from the point of view of personal loving relations. We accomplish this by acting in the likeness of the love that exists between the divine Persons. This process incorporates the Trinity into salvation. We become more God like by emulating the love of self, other persons, and the environment that exists in divine relations. The presence of Christ in history provides the necessary connection between the Trinity and our personal salvation. The presence of loving relations in a human life explains the mystery of the Trinity without thereby allowing us to understand the nature of divine love as such. While loving relations do not constitute our rational substance (we exist in and by ourselves as human beings), they are a necessary condition for becoming God like. To be God like is to be at peace (in love) at all levels of human relationships, namely, in the ways of the heart, other persons, and the


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environment. No one would dispute the point that the love of neighbor is essential to acting towards God, but so is the love of the environment. Cleaning the environment, for instance, is a spiritual action. Deliberately polluting the environment is immoral. The distinction between being human and being a person suggests that our love of God takes place at a finite, concrete, operational level of existence where self, others, and environment fuse into a dynamic spiritual unit. The Trinity in us prompts us to see God at all levels of human action. The loving image of the divine Trinity provides a guide to how the person-making process works. The process collapses without love. The love Christ has for us is central to the argument. Jean-Paul Sartre captures what happens in the absence of divine love in the line he puts in Cradeau’s mouth in No Exit, “Hell is just—other people.”21 The play’s characters, Cradeau, Estelle, and Inez, are in hell because they are locked into character. They cannot change themselves or the way others define them. Each character tortures the other “(in hell) they’ve made a saving in their hired help . . . the customers serve themselves. It’s like a cafeteria.” This is a good illustration of what it means to be disempowering towards others. In Christian theology and religion, love is the empowering base of everything. All names given to the Holy Spirit in Scriptures connect to love. We aspire to the love of others through the divine image. The image of God is our gateway to the moral life and friendship with God through loving relationships. The divine image appears to be veiled when the individual refuses to enter into communion with God (or is unable to do so in the case of No Exit), though the redemption suggests that the divine image remains open to us. The redemption of Christ allows us to stand in the enduring presence of the Holy Spirit, as a divine gift of ongoing love. The imago Dei expresses our metaphysical beginnings in God. The divine image also serves to express our continuing existence in God. Jacques Maritain uses the evidence of the divine image as an argument for the existence of God. He expresses the belief that we had an eternal existence in God before receiving our temporal beginning. He says the intuition is clearest in the act of knowing: [H]ow is it possible that that which is thus in the process of thinking, in the act of intelligence, which is immersed in the fire of knowing and of intellectual grasp of what is, should once have been a pure nothing, once did not exist . . . thus, I who am now in the act of thinking, have always existed.22 Introspection reveals the familiarity of the argument. The divine image is part of the fibrous structure of mind. This explains why the ontological argument, first developed by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, continues to attract attention. The ontological argument has its detractors not unlike Immanuel

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Kant’s rejoinder that existence is not a predicate or property of essence, notwithstanding. The presence of the divine image in the human form provides fertile ground for theological discussion. It explains the ease with which arguments for the existence of God flow out of human consciousness, while Catholic theologians view the mystery of Mary’s virgin conception as a movement from the image of God to the reality of Jesus. The appearance of the angel to Mary takes on fresh meaning as the divine image presents in the light of the divine image becoming flesh and blood. The metamorphosis of the Word would be difficult to explain had the divine procession taken place in reverse order, from the temporal to the eternal. 2. Genesis and Salvation The divine image fuels spirituality and the possibility of acting in the likeness of God. To put this differently, we are restless or on fire because of spirituality. According to Sacred Scripture, we can express the love of the Holy Spirit as fire. Aloysius Janssens says, “He is figured as fire, and is called Spirit.”23 Love generates a burning desire to move and impel the will of the lover towards the beloved. Aquinas observes the same movement, “For the name spirit in things corporeal seems to signify impulse and motion; for we call the breath and the wind by the term spirit.”24 Spirituality generates existential motion, thereby offering proof that the divine image leads us to act in the likeness of God. John Daniel Wild (1902–1972) uses human restlessness to develop an existential argument for the existence of (Transcendent) God. We base the argument on the fundamental experience of human anxiety. Existential dread (angst) prevents us from “feeling at home in any fixed pattern of life or framework of ideas, no matter how comprehensive or coherent it might be.” Persons “on spiritual fire” are beings in search of meaning. Spirituality pushes us to find the meaning of life. We work out answers that gather the disparate facts together and provide unity, but more questions arise, and the search for meaning continues. We construct new interpretations to make sense of life, but they prove to be equally fleeting and the search for meaning continues. Wild interprets the evidence of existential restlessness to suggest that the search for meaning continues until we find an ultimate unity that gives life meaning—God. He says, “The conclusion of the argument is this: the free action which lies at the heart of cultural, and even more of individual history, points to a transcendent unity, which is the ultimate, creative source of meaning and being, and the unity of the world.”25 The Holy Spirit directs our existential motion beyond any human, social, cultural, economic, political order. As we know from our lived experience, goods of the earth, personal achievements, always lead us to something we ought to be beyond what we are. Being spiritual or being human is the metaphysical ground for acting spiritually. To act in the likeness of God (towards


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the image of God) is to be spiritually alive or on fire in the face of God. We know the effect of spirituality in us as an innate loving tendency towards God. The spiritual energy does not chase evil as such, though misdirecting spiritual energies towards the denial of God is possible (we can throw junk food at spirituality, as appears to be the case with addiction). Wild’s argument does not move (ontologically) from the idea of transcendence to the reality of God’s existence, but is a lived experience of the existential need for selftranscendence. The image of God generates this restlessness as the voice of the Transcendent within. The divine voice calls us to use the power of God within “the heart” to become one with God. Wild’s observation raises Maritain’s argument to the next level. Not only do we see God in us, but we need to do something about that vision. We are broken people. The condition of sin creates a division in our connection to God. For instance, despair, and illness as division within the mind-body unit, provides evidence of misspent spiritual energy. The redemption answers our cry for wholeness. Spiritual healing quenches our thirst for divine connection. Spirituality, then, spills over into the existential search for meaning. This is how we recognize the divine image within. The word spirit is from the Greek pneuma meaning breath (Hebrew ruah, Latin spiritus) or life because breath is associated with life, fire, and movement, as detailed. Spirituality fuels the existential search for meaning or thirst for God. Spirituality as a tendency towards God takes place through the discovery of moral values. On occasion, we are unaware of the God addiction within us, though the existence of the spiritual always surfaces in the search for meaning. The intense suffering of Victor Frankl, not unlike Wild’s existential restlessness, provides evidence that the internal image of a loving God is the gateway to the true meaning of life. The failure to find meaning in life, or the loss of meaning through illness, arises through a division in the unity that characterizes life. Unity and perfection go hand in hand. Absolute perfection demands absolute unity. All living things resist destruction. Division leads to disease and illness. At the risk of oversimplifying things, disease refers to a division within a biological organism, whereas illness refers to a division within the mind-body connection. The reader can see the work of Lennart Nordenfelt and Liss Per-Erik for a detailed study of health issues and health promotion.26 The loss of spiritual meaning is expressed by a division in the mind-body unit. Spiritual illness is an instance of failing to act towards the image of God. The challenge facing us is to find meaning in hopeless situations. Spirituality plays a critical role in any holistic setting, whether in the realm of medicine, counseling, or discussion of the Trinity. Spirituality drives us to seek meaning through person-making activities. The goal of spirituality is to maintain a harmony of parts. The spiritual is distinct from the organic, but not separate from the dynamic unity that characterizes a human life. Spirit

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is an original animating life force, imbedded in an organism rather than acquired through experience. The spiritual is the innate offspring of the divine image in us. It generates an existential restlessness to act in the likeness of God, to search for Transcendent unity or ultimate source of meaning. The image of God is at the core of our being. Spirituality is our response to that divine core. In brief, the imago Dei generates a spiritual energy that spawns existential restlessness and the search for ultimate meaning in God. The Christian response to the spiritual is a return to God through history. Religion, if authentic, connects with the spiritual and provides assistance on the journey towards the divine image. The rituals and symbols of religious practice feed us inasmuch as they bring about the unity and harmony of a human life. The belief that God teaches us how to be spiritual through Jesus Christ is central to the Christian way of acting towards the image of God. The Father sent the Son to die for us in obedience to the will of the Father. He died out of love for us. God raised the Son from the dead, as He raises us from the dead in the image of God. We enter into relationship with the divine image through our experience of Jesus. This is possible because Christ has two natures, one divine and one human. Christ’s dual nature serves as a link between human persons and the divine Persons. Janssens calls attention to the Trinitarian baptism of Christ: the most glorious theophany of the New Testament takes place. While Christ stands in the river, the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove upon Him, and the voice of the Father comes from heaven: “Thou art my beloved Son. In thee I am well pleased.” The personalities of the Father and Son are evident. That the Holy Ghost is an independent Person follows from His appearance in the form of a dove.27 Baptism offers us redemption from sin. The Son of God is without sin. The mingling of the eternal and the temporal raises concerns in that regard. David Stanley wonders why Jesus accepted baptism; “It was understood by John and those who received it to be a symbol of a radical ‘about face,’ a reorientation of the whole person to God; hence a sign of metanoia.”28 Yet, Jesus never displays this attitude. He never interrupts his relationship with God. Still, the possibility of conflict between Jesus as divine and Jesus as human raises problems for some thinkers. For instance, if Jesus is divine, was his passion and death genuine? Did Jesus enter into a person-making process? Did he experience anxiety, fear, and suffering, as well as happiness? Did Jesus select his mother? Did his soul separate from his body at death? Did he descend into Hell? At the risk of oversimplifying a complex issue, the solution to these questions appears to rest in the two natures of Christ suggesting two activities.


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The divine activity expresses an uninterrupted dialogue with the Father, while the human activity tells the story of a man like us in every way except sin. Bernard P. Prusak explains that from the point of view of divinity, when Jesus prays to the Father, “He knows himself to be without sin and living completely with God.”29 From the human point of view, Jesus asked questions and expressed astonishment at some facts. He expressed fear and anger, and enjoyed companionship, food, and drink. While the Gospel texts focus on Jesus’ message rather than on biography, they provide sufficient insight into Christ’s dual nature. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John report the words and deeds of Jesus before his death and resurrection. While the divine and human natures of Jesus are distinct, they are not separate. They exist in the same Person joined by love. The Blessed Trinity exists in the relation of love. We receive the redemptive love of God in baptism. Jesus came so we could know the love the Father has for us. Jesus teaches us that love of the Father takes place through love of neighbor. Love of neighbor mirrors the relation of love that exists between the divine Persons. We read the well-known Corinthian verse on love at some Christian weddings because it expresses the essence of Jesus’ love for us: Love is patient; Love is kind. Love is not jealous, it does not put on airs, it is not snobbish. Love is never rude. It is not self-seeking, it is not prone to anger; neither does it brood over injuries. Love does not rejoice in what is wrong but rejoices with the truth. There is no limit to love’s forbearance, to its trust, its hope, its power to endure.30 A phenomenological description of the word love suggests “letting be,” not controlling or possessing the object of love. We are free to accept God’s love and act towards the image of God. The love of God is gentle because it does not cage or control the other. To love someone is to help them grow to be themselves. In loving us, the Holy Spirit calls us forth, but love implies free will and the ability to refuse to act towards the image of God. The human Jesus is not omniscient, omnipotent, or ubiquitous. He did not choose his mother or survive his death. When Jesus prays, he prays to the Father, not to himself. He sees himself as freely entering into a pilgrimage towards God. The introduction to the divinity of Jesus is through his resurrection. The resurrection marks a transition from the natural life of Jesus as human to the supernatural life of Jesus as divine. His resurrection is not that of a corpse. He appears as a glorified body. The apostles recognize him with difficulty. He is pictured as eating, talking, and wounded, though he is changed. The Easter message is that the love of the Father transforms a mortal existence into eternal life. Jesus’ earthly struggles taught us to accomplish eternal life in history. Jesus did not have to live and die for us. In becoming flesh and dying for us, he illustrated the importance of a loving person-making process.

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He taught us that the divine image sends us on an errand towards God. The message of Jesus connects with our experiences, not primarily through his divinity, but primarily through his humanness as gateway to that divinity. We depend on Christ like relations or discipleship to become more truly personal and more God-like. We now proceed to a more detailed study of those relations to examine how they mirror relations taking place between the divine Persons. The distinction between being human and being a person opens with a study of how the image of God translates into loving virtue. The personmaking process tells the story of becoming a moral personality. Karl Rahner explains how the “Word became flesh” signals the beginning of the human journey rather than its end: Human-being is not some absolutely terminated quantity, which while persisting as a quite self-contained whole is combined with some other thing (in this case the Logos) by a wholly external miracle. Humanbeing is rather a reality absolutely open upwards; a reality which reaches its highest (though indeed “unexacted”) perfection, the realization of the highest possibility of man’s being, when in it the Logos himself becomes existent in the world.31 The appearance of God the Son in history is compatible with the representation of God as a changing, dynamic Being. Bernard Prusak argues this claim well as he notes with approval this key distinction: “He who is unchangeable in himself can himself become subject to change in something else,”32 while Fritjof Capra (in conversation with Thomas Matus and David Steindl-Rast) expresses the dynamic character of human action in a similar vein: We are born as individuals, but our task is to become persons, by deeper and more intricate, more highly developed relationships. There is no limit to becoming more truly personal.33 John Hick’s classic work Evil and the God of Love, is likewise based on the dynamic “soul-making” character of human existence.34 Hick’s point is well taken, though I prefer the expression “person-making” to “soul-making” because it roots the process of becoming personal in existential soil. I argued elsewhere that “soul-making” is more at home in a tradition (from Plato to Descartes) that identifies personal identity with the soul.35 This view compounds the difficulty of explaining personal identity in the afterlife. Aquinas recognizes this problem when he says that the disembodied soul is less of a person. He intended to correct that deficiency through the doctrine of the resurrection. The risen bear the imprint of a spatialtemporal horizon. The person-making process is characterized by the presence of the eternal (historicity) and the temporal (historicism) dimension of human


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existence.36 For Hick, Salvation is earned in history: to be human in the face of the Eternal is to be an incarnate consciousness in the world along with others, sharing with them the responsibility of civilizations and the construction of a better world. The view of the person as “I,” “self,” “subject” or “ego” is an abstraction that misses the central point about God, salvation, and being on a pilgrimage towards the Absolute. The “I” as walled in hermetically sealed center of interiority is an elusive entity. It always exists beyond what comes to mind. It lacks relational existence. I could not find out (outside of Descartes) when the sense of “I” as subject came into being or why we use it to refer to who we are. In the tradition, the essential “I” functions as a soul or subject of experiences. The “self” or “ego” is equally elusive since it is not experienced. The disembodied subject expresses a process of acting towards the divine image that calls for more realism than it delivers. For that reason, I shy away from the use of “I” as structure to focus on the person-making processes that generate the “I.” The processes provide the sort of existential grounding required in realistic salvation theory. The belief in the Trinitarian character of the divine image lends itself to this approach. The process of becoming personal (person making) can be opened in any of its three streams of associations, but let us begin with the relevance of the divine image to the environmental-self. Big bang science enlists a necessary connection between self and environment. Science informs us that the universe unfolds as the output of matter that came into existence some fifteen to twenty billion years ago. Stephen William Hawking (1942–) wonders if the original state of matter and energy suggests intelligent design: Heat had to be exactly as it was because a decrease of heat by as little as one part in a million million would have caused the universe to collapse . . . 40 Electro-Magnetism and gravity had to be correct to one part in 10 the rate 55 60 123 37 of expansion to 10 , density to 10 , and smoothness of expansion to 10 . He assigns responsibility for the origin of matter to imaginary (negative) numbers. The universe could have existed eternally. The answer to the question ‘why something exists rather than nothing’ shifts the issue from the order of time to the order of being. Stephen William Lane Craig claims that these numbers provide scientific confirmation of the cosmological argument. He interprets the data as a profile of God-at-work: Since He created the universe from nothing, we know that He must be enormously powerful, if not omnipotent. Since He brought the universe into being without any antecedently determining conditions and finetuned it with a precision that literally defies comprehension, He must be both free and unimaginably intelligent, if not omniscient. Moreover, the

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED fact that the entire known universe, from the smallest elementary particles to the most distant stars, was designed in such a way as to be a suitable environment for the existence of human life on Earth suggests the astounding conclusion that He may have some special concern for us. These properties constitute the central core of what theists mean by “God.”38

Paul Davies sides with the theistic camp. He calculates that the odds of all the right variables coming together by chance to form the universe are at least one followed by a thousand billion, billion zeros.39 The belief that the earth and intelligent life originated randomly calls for an even greater act of faith than does the belief in a created world. Science vindicates Aquinas’s design argument. We now have reasonable grounds from the scientific community to suggest that humans came into being as the output of environmental processes begun long ago. This is the environmental-self. The social-self is another story: God the Father, Creator of all things, extends an invitation to Abraham (and Abraham religions) to enter into personal communion with God the Son. The redemptive event marks the opening of the Genesis dialogues. The Son incarnate teaches Christians to love the Father by loving each other. The baptism of Jesus is an event through which the Holy Spirit sets our hearts on fire as they fill with divine love (the central or interior self). The events of the Trinity take place in duration above time, as God makes us in His image, though Christians realize the divine imprint through an historical awakening to the presence of the Eternal in history. This is said to explain (not understand) what it means to be made in the image of God. The distinction between being human and being a person marks the effect of the Incarnation on Christians. God creates human beings in His image (understanding, memory, will, and love.) This is mystery. The essential nature of the divine Persons is relational. This means that we become persons by imitating divine relations. The person-making process is a return to God made possible by the coming of the Word as Logos. Being human and becoming personal are related. We can become more truly personal because the redemptive suffering of Christ actualizes the human capability to love God. The imago Dei is the spiritual fuel that drives us towards God. The Trinity suggests that the one God subsists as three distinct personalities or relations. This view overlaps what Karl Rahner says about the relevance of the Trinity to a human life: “Each one of the three divine persons communicates himself to man in gratuitous grace in his own particularity and diversity.”40 The human being becomes moral or develops a moral personality at the output of three distinct relationships made in the image of a Triune God. The pilgrimage towards God takes place as the output of loving relationships taking place at the levels of a (1) social-self, (2) a central or interior self, and (3) an environmental-self. The “I,” “self,” “subject,” or “ego” arises at the output of these associations as spirituality cognizant of becoming personal. These develop-


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ments obtain (4) in the likeness of the Blessed Trinity. While we are born human, we become beings-towards-salvation (persons) through the love-grace of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The gift of grace is evident in the relations or associations that make us persons. The personality of the Father is present in creation, the personality of the Word made flesh is present in the love of neighbor, the personality of the Spirit is present in the human heart—three distinct divine personalities that exist in one God, a triune God that lays the ontological ground of the possibility of salvation. We now turn to a discussion of the details surrounding the three arms of that process. (1) We are social by nature. Studies in human development have found that the human brain only has a three to four year window of opportunity for the development of language skills. Children isolated from human contact since a young age (feral children) do not have fully developed brains. Children who miss the opportunity for language development do not recover language use. Genie illustrates the case. She is a feral child discovered in a Los Angeles home in 1970. Genie experienced severe social isolation for thirteen years. When she was first discovered she was affected by a strange “bunny walk” and constantly spat and clawed. She babbled like an infant. Someone may have beaten Genie for making noises as a child. She had no language skills and was brain-damaged because of this isolation. A team of linguists and scientists who were studying language development worked with her and found that though Genie quickly learned words she was not able to develop language skills. This case illustrates the significance of a social-self to personal identity. Human freedom takes place in the encounters of society. The first and most basic step in the development of virtue is to generate a loving dialogue between neighbors. Each of the four Gospels attests that the central message of Jesus is to love one another, as Jesus loves us “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”41 The commandment “love one another” expresses a summary of the Christian message to forgive those who trespass against us, and to be compassionate towards them. Jesus invites us to love our enemies as well as our friends. He has no political ambition. The logic of the divine heart brings a Father’s love to the broken people of his day; the “lepers,” “cripples,” “women,” “harlots,” and “tax collectors.” The historical Jesus invited them to sit at the banquet table with him and renew their relationship with a loving, compassionate, and merciful Father. In so doing, Jesus followed a law of love written in the human heart, though he appeared to break Jewish law. He invites us to continue this ministry in our day. In the best of societies, the law of the land would not be in disharmony with the law of the heart. The divine command to love one another is as central to the Blessed Trinity as to the Christian message. It goes beyond treating others as ends in themselves. The deontological interpretation of the divine image does not do

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justice to the rich texture of love found in human agency. In my opinion, Gabriel Marcel’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity presents a fuller account of the spiritual nature of actions performed in the likeness of the divine image than does the Kantian invocation for deontology. The distinction Marcel establishes between two types of relationships is critical to his argument. He says that the first type of relation, the “problem mentality,” is divisive (promotes illness) since it invites a view of the other as being separate from the self. The second type of relation, the “mystery of participation” is more promising (holistic) since it suggests that the other is an extension of the self. Whereas the problem mentality, an offspring of primary reflection, leads to unavailability, denial, and exploitation, the view of the other as self-extension, the product of love or secondary reflection, leads to availability, participation, and fidelity because it is based on a Christian philosophy of love. Love alone allows us to grasp the uniqueness of another person. Marcel opens his inquiry into the redemptive nature of love with a discussion of the mind-body problem. He explains how loving relationships exclude dualism: (he says) I do not have a body since I am my body (sounds like the environmental-self.) The relationship I have with others is analogous to my own embodiment. The other is an extension of self, not a subject of exploitation. We share a common responsibility to build a better world, as pilgrims towards the Absolute. We share in one another’s joys and sorrows. Together we reach God. The presence of divinity in human relationships offers hope of a better world to come. Marcel says that hope is the fundamental stuff of life. Marcel’s philosophy expresses a dependence on divine communion through others. His philosophy replaces Descartes’ sterile formula “I think, therefore, I am” with an openended, more promising “we are, therefore, I am.” Marcel is keenly aware of the barren waste of our self-sufficiency. The social-self is an essential element in acting towards God. To love others is to align the image of the divine within us with the image of the divine in others. To love others is to empower them. This is why Marcel spoke of the profound unity between subjects in loving relationships. To disempower others is to align the evil within us with the evil within others; to treat others as separate beings.42 (2) The second movement of the person-making process focuses on the internal dimension of God’s kingdom. Marvin Meyer affirms the teachings of Jesus on the whereabouts of God’s kingdom; “The Kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.”43 When we know ourselves, then, we will know God’s law of love; “and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then, you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty.” Jesus announces the existence of God within the human heart, first declared by Isaiah in Hebrews Scripture. Jesus tells the story of divinity through parables. He appeals to the law inscribed in the human heart—the law of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus (the man) receives at baptism. His first line is


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“Who does not know God’s law?” The hearers reply they do. Then Jesus asks why they fail to obey the internal law? The law of the governance of things, says Aquinas, is divine because it comes from God. This law is eternal because it exists outside of time. The natural law that exists in us is our participation in eternal law. All things partake of eternal law, some by design, while the “rational creature” partakes of eternal law in an intellectual and rational manner. Knowledge of eternal law is imprinted in us, as we are guided in the moral life by two intuited precepts of reason, one speculative, the other, practical.44 The first arms the speculative intellect with the principles of sufficient reason and identity, while the second announces a habitus of the first principle of practical reason—do good and avoid evil (synderesis). The person-making process operates within the framework of the divine image embedded in the human heart as the law of love. We act in the likeness of eternal law in rational and loving pursuit of virtuous acts towards God. To love the divine law is to pursue the end intended for us by God. (3) The third arm of the person-making process exists in our relationship with the environment. In 1967, Lynn White, a medieval historian, published an often-quoted view about holding Christianity responsible for the state of the planet.45 While his argument is dated and simplistic, the point he makes about our attitude towards the environment is well taken. We do often choose to disempower the environment through poor resource management and pollution. This is the result of bad management and careless behavior, not natural law teachings. While the importance of the environment appears to be underdescribed during the Middle Ages, this is an historical decision rather than disrespect of nature. In the Genesis story of creation, cited by White, God gives us dominion over the earth, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.”46 White uses this text more than any other to make the case that natural law theory expresses a wanton disregard for the state of the environment. His criticism overlooks the implications of the next line of text where God looked at everything he had made, “and found it very good.” Enlightened Christians do not hear the creation story as an invitation to destroy what God loves. God gave us dominion over things of the earth on condition that we act responsibly and respectfully allow the environment to move itself and us towards the intended end. Peter P. Cvek’s article on the environment recognizes the interdependence between the environment and us.47 He makes the point that the love of nature includes a responsibility towards sustainable development. Care of the environment is a deeply spiritual act; sustainable development extends the love of neighbor to include future generations. The Gaia hypothesis suggests that the environment is a living system. Like any other living system, the planet resists destruction. It seeks unity or

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clings to itself as it moves towards the end intended by God. The age of pervasive technology has led to a paradigm shift in which human intentions change the course of natural developments. People are redesigning the planet in the secular image of human beings. The needs of future generations are not considered. Gro Harlem Bruntland, Prime Minister of Denmark, noted in her report on the environment and sustainable developments that we are worse off now than we were fifty years ago.48 I am not sure that we are better off today, as our frail “Kyoto” attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emission demonstrate, but this is due to what Martin Heidegger says is an attitude of greed. The solution to the problem can only come from a change of heart. Martin Heidegger warns that the destruction of the environment continues because modern technology is not respectful of the being of things.49 He notes the change in attitude from ancient technology to modern technology. While ancient technology waits on nature to do work, modern technology transforms nature into energy in waiting. The problem arises in the attitude we take to nature. We are like locust on the land without regard for the being of things. Nature is not given time to heal herself. The hegemony of technology has shifted from a “letting be” of nature to the control of nature. This attitude has put the planet in peril. The divine commandment “harden not your heart” applies to our attitude towards nature and towards one another. Love of neighbor and love of planet are not strange bedfellows. We are not outside the environment looking in, but environmental degradation carries us in its wake putting the whole of life at-risk. The Gaia hypothesis recognizes the effect of living system on the environment. In destroying the environment, we destroy ourselves. The attitude of greed and control arises against the face of the law of love and “letting be” inscribed in the human heart. (4) The three arms of the person-making process are distinct, but not separate. The loving relations that characterize the Blessed trinity apply to us. This unpacks the consequences of God’s image in us. A person is the output of a human being in relationships. The error of Descartes was to imagine being human outside these associations. No “I” exists in his analytical geometry. But the personal “I” takes form as the “I” springs into reflexive awareness of its Trinitarian roots. The analogical unity with the Trinity suggests that those associations will lead us to God inasmuch as they are born out of love. The image of God’s love in the human heart, other persons, and the environment expresses a Trinitarian exemplar, made possible by the Son, for a doctrine of the virtues. 3. Application How does the Christian person-making process work, given that we cannot know the nature of God as such? Our model for acting in the likeness of the


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divine image is Christ. Christ has two natures and two roles in Christian society. First, Christ fills a practical role teaching us about the love he has for us. He shows us how to love as we enter into person-making associations with self, other persons, and the environment. Second, the teachings of Christ exercise a speculative role by showing us why we should love the Father by acting in the likeness of God. The divine image appeals to faith and to reason. In a discussion on the mystery of God’s nature, Aquinas says in Treatise on God that we can know God by knowing how God is not.50 Aquinas proceeds negatively to detail God’s nature, namely, God is not finite, imperfect, limited, and so on. The process leads to a view of God as being simple, perfect, good, infinite, immutable, eternal, one. In like manner, St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians enters a discussion on the excellence of love through a detail of, not only what love is, but also what love is not.51 We act towards God or become virtuous by removing the imperfections that exist in our person-making associations. We make spiritual progress towards God. Collectively, we generate a loving society made in the likeness of God. The commandment to love one another begins as an attempt to remove the imperfections that exist in our relationships. We remove the “hardening of the heart” that prevents us from entering into loving relationships with other persons, self, and the environment. The process of acting in the likeness of God leads to the construction of a personal-socialenvironmental order made in the image of God. The imperfections of injustice, hate, oppression, greed, anger, envy, jealousy, lust, or division often lace our experience of the world. The experience of the historical Jesus reveals a loving, forgiving, compassionate, intelligent, and just God. Christian society and religious societies in general, strive to overcome divisiveness by struggling against oppression, alienation, and injustice. In this manner, society safeguards the rights of individuals, freedom, tolerance, equality, and promotes a fair distribution of resources. The distribution of resources is a socio-political matter of justice. But the attitude of doing so is based on spiritual values. The world of Jesus teaches us how the negativities of greed, revenge, and the control of others can give way to charity, forgiveness, and compassion. To act in the likeness of God is to implement loving relationships on the arms of the person-making process to attain this vision. The presence of the divine in human affairs expresses a tendency toward unity, truth, goodness, and beauty of community. To love others is to promote personal freedom and social equality. In the loving experience, we pursue personal growth towards God by refusing to treat the chaos and illusions of the superficial level of existence (secularism) as our final end. The natural law invites us to treat other human beings with respect and dignity. The ways of the heart move us to respect individual autonomy, promote informed consent, justice, and fairness in the allocation of whatever scarce resource is required to realize the good life. We resist destruction and

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treat other persons, including the environment, as an extension of our being. The Cartesian self-sufficiency of the metaphysical self is an illusion. Each individual is an absolute, not because of the existence of a separate subject of experience, but because the operations of the person-making process are based on the unity of a loving Trinity of Persons. Divine love unifies the whole of creation. The person-making process takes place in history. Each act of compassion, forgiveness, love, marks progress towards a realization of the end God intends for us. The global village divides on the nature of that vision, and free individuals often pursue private agendas. We fail to agree as often as we succeed. The journey begins as an expression of respect and tolerance for others that they might extend their love and tolerance to us, especially in a world where cultural differences separate us. Global ethics is in crisis, but a shared ancestry in the divine image offers promise that we can sit at a common table, break bread, tell cultural stories about how we act in the likeness of God or a Higher Power, and dance. 4. Conclusion The text of Genesis 1:26 sends us on an errand towards salvation. The discussion illustrates how casting the loving dialectical relations between the image and likeness of the Trinity on the human psyche, other persons, and the environment can accomplish this plan. The reflection on the divine image takes us on a spiritual journey from the divine Personalities to the person-making process. Salvation is an historical experience, taking place by acting in the likeness of God. That process is possible, as Karl Rahner reminds us, because the loving relations between the divine Persons provide the ontological ground of salvation. We know the love of Father, Son, and Spirit in the associations through which we become more personal. John Hick’s soul-making theodicy captures the spiritual challenges of this journey. First, we know the divine uniqueness of Jesus as the Word made flesh. Jesus became human to teach us about divine love. His teachings on the love of neighbor serve as a principle of redemptive social action. The work of great Christian thinkers like Marcel and Maritain captures this essence in the Holy Bible. Marcel’s philosophy of the other as self-extension epitomizes the selfless nature of Jesus’ love for us. Second, the teachings of the Holy Spirit fill our heart with the loving attitude required to love ourselves before we can hear God’s law. We hear the eternal law in the prophetic voice of philosophers like Augustine, Aquinas, and today, through critical articles like Michael Dauphinais’s Imago Dei. Third, to focus upon person making from the perspective of an environmental-self is to stand in the presence of mystery, and to give thanks to the Father for the gift of creation. We hear this message through the voices of


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contemporary thinkers like William Craig, Paul Davies, Fritjof Capra, and Peter Cvek. The diverse faces of salvation form a dynamic unit to actualize the potential present in the divine image, a potential to act in the likeness of God and become God like. This is the fundamental stuff of salvation. While the nature of God and the existence of three Persons in one God remains a mystery, the reading of Genesis 1:26 sharpens the spiritual thirst to know God through person-making connectors. It explains why we are relentless in the search for meaning, as John Wild makes known, and how spirituality drives the search for meaning, as Victor Frankl explains. It obviates how the love of virtue takes place through the love of environment, self, and other persons. It explains how the divine Persons are faces of the same God. It explains how the encounter with the Blessed Trinity takes place in all our relationships, which unpacks some of what Rahner encouraged, and what we need most to be spiritual.


Sixteen THE SPIRITUAL NATURE OF DEPENDENCY Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it? I will give the latter alternative a fair trial. Who knows but the moral interest may become developed. William James, Diary, 1 February 1870. 1. Spiritual, Physical, and Psychological Aspects of Substance and Behavioral Dependency Spirituality propels us into action towards the divine image. The presence of the divine image in the human psyche generates restlessness, as we constantly need to discover meaning in everything we do. We act for meaning but each discovery leads us to search for greater and higher meaning. This incessant need to act and find (ultimate) meaning is factual, not normative. The search for meaning does not die down or go away if it lands on negative emotion. Spirituality is blind in that it can move us towards all sorts of meaning, good and bad. Putting the spiritual tendency on a bad diet of negative connectors does not quench the thirst for meaning, though it leads us away from the divine image. It generates a need to engage the environment, other persons, and subjectivity in destructive ways. The spiritual tendency naturally inclines us to act towards God or Higher Power, but the property of freedom gives us the opportunity to redirect spiritual energies towards negative outcomes. Habit decreases the agent’s freedom. The alcoholic or drug addict does not freely choose the next fix or drink. A spiritual tendency gone sour is what drives the choice. Spirituality surfaces as a loving tendency. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274) suggests that synderesis or the desire to pursue good and avoid evil (disunity) is an innate tendency at the core of being human. All human beings, including infants, naturally tend towards the good. Parents are at the front line of their children’s moral education as they reinforce behavior. While the tendency towards good is innate, culture determines what counts as a good action. The text of Genesis affirms the goodness of creation; “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.”1 But spirituality can be driven by egotism and dishonesty, a false sense of self, others, and the environment leading to the development of negative emotions. Addiction arises as an unhealthy way of dealing with such emotions. Spirituality becomes an

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agency for unity or disunity depending on moral choices, and the attendant history of negative and positive emotions. 2. Models of Substance and Behavioral Dependency: Causation and Treatment The problem of substance and behavioral dependency seems to arise in part because of personal choices, but genetic factors or protein deficiency might also be contributory factors. Dependency is a complex problem that has reached the level of the popular press. Jeffrey Kluger, reports in Time Magazine: Researchers in the U. S., Britain, and New Zealand released the latest results from an on-going thirty-year study of roughly 1,000 children born in the early 1970s. One purpose of the research was to determine which temperament types were most likely to lead to addictions. The just released results showed that compulsive gamblers, drinkers and drug users have high underlying levels of negative emotionality, a syndrome that includes nervousness, anger and a tendency to worry and feel victimized. Significantly they also score lower in the so called constraint category, meaning they are given to impulsiveness and thrill seeking.2 When the discussion of addiction appears in Time, we know that concern over the nature, origin, and care of the addicted is widespread. Theories that purport to explain the addiction phenomenon from either perspective abound. Some of the better-known models include the religious view of dependence, the reinforcement model of addiction, dependence theories, theories of dysfunctional behavior, and the medical model. This chapter discusses addiction from the point of view of negative emotions or the harm that arises by using substances or indulging in compensatory behaviors as a fix for painful emotional states. This approach is compatible with the medical model since some forms of that model treat alcoholism as a disease and advocate total abstinence. In this instance, a doctor refers the patient to counseling or a 12-Step program to rebuild self-esteem. Other applications of the medical model advocate harm reduction as an alternative to total abstinence. A. The Case of Alcoholism: Causation and Treatment Models Some alcoholics claim to have crossed an invisible line from substance abuse to substance dependence whereas others think of themselves as being substance dependent from the onset of drinking. Research in the alcohol field navigates deep waters between wide ranges of views on alcoholism. Some research suggests that alcoholics can be trained to return to normal drinking, other research disputes that claim. Some stakeholders maintain that the com-


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plete abstinence from the ingestion of alcohol is required for recovery from addiction, while others maintain that alcohol dependents can learn to drink in moderation. The range of explanation for the phenomenon of alcohol dependence includes biological, sociological, psychological, cognitive learning theories, and religious explanations often competing side by side for top billing as the main reason someone becomes substance dependent. Yet competing theories can claim some success. How is that possible? One possible explanation is that alcoholics are not alike. The literature on alcohol dependence suggests that four main kinds of alcoholics exist: Alpha: heavy genetic component, born alcoholic; Beta: bingers; Gamma: Northern Europe Pattern, long history of increasing use and maintained controlled drinking, followed by a plateau, then a “slippery slope” into alcoholism; Delta: Southern Europe Pattern, seen in Asian and African Americans as well, similar to Northern Europe Pattern but shorter plateau. This distinction suggests that the definition of alcoholism varies among cultures. Europeans appear to be more relaxed about alcohol abuse than Westerners are. But this does not explain why alcoholism exists across the cultures. My research into alcoholism found that the nature of alcoholism puzzled the scientific community that generally failed to distinguish between abuse and dependence.3 In the early days, empirical researchers asked: (1) Is alcoholism a disease? (2) Is there a genetic component? (3) Are emotional stress factors involved? (4) Is it progressive and irreversible? (5) Are learning factors involved? (6) Can an alcoholic stop drinking after taking one drink? (7) Why isn’t everyone who drinks an alcoholic? (8) Why do people who experience adverse effects from drinking continue to drink? i. The Religious View The Religious view is the belief that substance dependence is a sin. This model describes the addict as being immoral. It dates back to the nineteenth century and the temperance revivalist movement. These meetings included testimony from drunkards standing to make public confession of their sin and vowing total abstinence before God and a crowd of onlookers. In our day, a watered down version of that tradition persists in some form, as some alcohol-

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ics will visit a priest or minister to sign a pledge to stay away from alcohol for a fixed period. I am not aware of any studies on the success rate of this behavior, though by definition, pledges are not long lasting. Pledging abstinence might compound the guilt associated with alcohol consumption, if the subject breaks the promise to maintain sobriety, or returns to alcohol consumption once the period of pledged abstinence ends. Empirical research suggests that alcohol dependence is not the result of a weakened will. Alcoholics can calculate the benefits of delaying a drink, if it means drinking more later on. The main problem with the religious view is that dependence is not the result of a weakened will. ii. The Genetic Component The view that a genetic component determines alcoholism probably explains the Alpha kind of alcoholic, though it does not explain the other kinds. The Gamma and Delta types appear to cross “an invisible line” into alcoholism. This means that if in some instances alcohol consumption develops into a disease, in theory, alcoholism is avoidable. But does the disease generate the genetic (Alpha) state or does the genetic condition cause the disease? Studies show that the children of alcoholic parents are three to four times more likely to become alcohol dependent. Is this due to a neurological condition or to the socialization of some children? iii. The Reinforcement Models The Reinforcement model, on the other hand, teaches the alcoholic (or problem drinker) to associate the consumption of alcohol with positive and negative reinforcements. Reinforcement controls drinking behavior (slurping or sipping.) For instance, mild electrical shock discourages slurping behavior. Under normal circumstances aversive therapy should work, though it usually does not. Positive reinforcement puts a different spin on things by offering addicts an opportunity to earn a prize or reward for staying clean and sober. For instance, a 12-week program in San Francisco pays an addict up to forty dollars per week just to stay clean. Participants agree to go to a clinic three times a week to provide a urine sample and pick up a monetary prize for testing negative. The amounts start small but rise with every clean result. An addict who remains drug free for two months could earns as much as $ 600 USD. Getting clean is often easier than staying clean. Some addicts use the clean time as an opportunity to save for a binge or to purchase a large stash of drugs. Addictive behavior defies logic or common sense. Some substance dependent individuals will squander months of earnings and forego other necessities of life on a one-day binge. The addict’s brain chemistry contributes to this behavior: the usual reward centers (dopamine tract) shut down in


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the absence of a drug of choice. Erin Donovan, a constable with the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, told me about an unfortunate addict she found trying to inject peanut butter into his veins. The need to “get high” and avoid the pain of withdrawal was so intense in his case that he compulsively had to shoot up something, even if this meant death by peanut butter. Experiments with rats show that when given the choice between feeding their children and working for a drug reward that rats choose the drug. This suggests that the attraction to a given drug can be so strong that we need to find alternative reinforcement as powerful as the drug of choice, or look beyond the reinforcement model for a solution to drug dependency. The attempt to use reinforcement techniques to teach alcoholics controlled drinking produces mixed results. In the early seventies, Linda C. Sobell and Mark B. Sobell studied controlled drinking in Gamma alcoholics. They found that subjects trained in controlled drinking did better than subjects trained in abstinence.4 In the 1980s, Mary Pendery, collected follow up data on the controlled drinkers, found contrary evidence. Of Sobell’s twenty controlled drinking trained subjects, “four died in alcohol related accidents, eight drank excessively, six abstained totally only after repeated hospitalizations, one (managed) controlled drinking, and one could not be found.”5 iv. The Dependence Model Many factors blur the distinction between substance abuse and substance dependence. The Dependence model is gaining widespread acceptance among members of the social service profession. Counselors use the guidelines based on this model published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV).6 Physiological dependence and withdrawal are not necessary and sufficient conditions of dependence. Substance dependence takes place with or without physiological dependence. Tolerance, as described in the DSM-IV, is the “markedly increase intake of the substance needed to achieve the same effect,” or conversely “the same amount of the substance has markedly less effect.” Indications of withdrawal are either “the substance’s characteristic withdrawal syndrome is experienced, or the substance (or one closely related) is used to avoid or relieve withdrawal symptoms.” The signposts of alcohol dependence do not necessarily include physiological withdrawal because anyone can experience it. For instance, the individual that abuses alcohol by ingesting twenty-six ounces of alcohol per day for five consecutive days can experience withdrawal if he or she does not ingest alcohol on day six. This is a case of alcohol abuse though not necessarily a case of alcohol dependence. The American Psychiatric Association suggests that dependence takes place with or without physiological dependence, and consequently with or without withdrawal symptoms when the substance is withheld. According to

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the DSM-IV, substance dependence leads to clinically significant distress or impairment, as shown in a single twelve-month period by three or more of the following: The amount or duration of use is often greater than intended. The patient repeatedly tries without success to control or reduce substance use. The patient spends much time using the substance, recovering from its effects, or trying to obtain it. The patient reduces or abandons important work, social, or leisurely activities because of substance use. The patient continues to use the substance, despite knowing that it has probably caused ongoing physical or psychological problems.7 Substance abuse, on the other hand, causes clinically significant distress or impairment, if one or more of the following is present in a single twelvemonth period: Because of repeated use, the patient fails to carry out major obligations at work, home, or school. The patient repeatedly uses substances even when it is physically dangerous to do so. The patient repeatedly has legal problems resulting from substance use. Despite knowing that it has caused or worsened social or interpersonal problems, the patient continues to use the substance. For this class of substance, the patient has never fulfilled criteria for Substance Dependence.8 The goal of diagnostic questionnaires is to distinguish between substance abuse and substance dependence (alcoholism). But addiction is a complex phenomenon and defining the term presents a challenge for both the physician and for the patient. The challenge facing us is that the DSM-IV’s objective criteria do not necessarily identify a client’s disguised defensive subjective state. Graeme M. Cunningham, Director of Alcohol and Drug Services, Homewood Health Centre, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, finds: More often than not, the patient presenting to a physician’s office who is alcohol-dependent will either not recognize that alcoholism is his primary disease or, if this realization is present, will deny its consequences and be unwilling or unprepared to discuss this diagnosis with the primary physician. 9


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Cunningham, having years of field experience in this field, uses the CAGE questionnaire, introduced by John A. Ewing in 1970, as part of his general screening process to identify alcohol dependent adults.10 He says that CAGE has been shown to have a positive predictive power of 87 percent when compared with other screening tools. After a three-month waiting period, Cunningham reassesses patients who answer yes to only one or none of the questions. He presents one of two treatment options to clients who answer yes to two or more questions. Mild to moderately motivated patients are referred to community programs, 12-Step meetings, or counseling. Cunningham refers patients who have had previous treatment, multiple drug use, concurrent medical diagnosis, or concurrent psychiatric diagnosis to residential treatment programs, such as the one he directs at Homewood. A benefit to keeping the questions simple is that substance abuse clouds judgment. The impaired mind cannot think clearly. The alcoholic state of mind cannot choose among DSM-IV options. The client often does not recognize alcohol dependence, even when dependency is obvious to family and friends. In a corruption of Lloyd Morgan’s Canon, the patient occasionally opts for the simplest explanation (substance abuse) when the more complex explanation (substance dependence) is more appropriate. So why would a client facing alcohol problems choose to identify a drinking behavior as alcohol dependence when the less damaging alcohol abuse descriptor seems to fit nicely? Personal autonomy is a cherished value while the admission of powerlessness removes it. I think to encourage clients to acknowledge dependence; we should develop an approach that blends logic with the client’s honest feelings about the problem. Still, some clients appear incapable of being honest at treatment entry given the nature of the disease. Therefore, this solution presents its own challenges. v. The Medical Model The Medical model sees addiction as a disease. Substance dependence arises because the ingestion of alcohol triggers an involuntary response in some clients, though we have yet to identify a common mechanism leading to substance dependency. Studies of brain physiology show that the areas of the brain that are known to be involved in processing dopamine activate when test subjects use drugs, alcohol, or engage in gambling and some sexual habits (the brain does not distinguish between chemical use and these other coping behaviors). The behavior generates negative emotions when it arises as the attempt to control feelings chemically. Under normal circumstances, the brain produces its dopamine or pleasure-inducing chemicals. Dependency arises as the brain learns to accept substitute, ingested chemicals for these natural chemicals. Physiologi-

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cal withdrawal symptoms result from the brain’s inability to produce dopamine in the absence of a chemical or behavioral stimulant. Still, not all substance dependent subjects experience withdrawal. At some point in treatment, brain cells appear to regenerate and natural dopamine production resumes. A deficient dopamine cycle and the phenomenon of negative emotions— whether from poor self-image or childhood abuse—are complex co-dependents in sustained alcohol consumption and out-of-control lifestyle. Obsessivecompulsive behavior appears as a characteristic trait of this lifestyle. The first priority of the medical model is to restore the individual to biological unity or health. Once accomplished, and the patient is detoxified, addiction medicine focuses on other aspects of recovery such as healing the mindbody connection. This might be the point to refer a patient to counseling and Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), founded in 1935 on the belief that an alcohol dependent individual could never return to controlled drinking. Tom Crawford, Director of the methadone program in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and specialist in addiction medicine, treats alcoholism and other drug dependencies as he would any other disease and prescribes a rigorous program of detoxification, counseling, and abstinence or harm reduction depending on context. He refers most patients to 12-Step programs, though he advocates harm reduction for others. In some cases, the use of a 12-Step model takes place in conjunction with the medical model. The 12-Step A.A. model views addiction as both disease and illness, and advocates total abstinence from the consumption of alcohol. This model views alcohol dependence as entirely spiritual, arising out of the attempt to fix negative emotions. This suggests that some behaviors, including some obsessive-compulsive forms of drinking, drug use, gambling, and shopping are similar. These maladaptive choices attempt to fix the way some individuals feel about things. The tremendous success of 12-Step programs is due in large measure to the therapeutic effect of the anonymous meetings in rewiring faulty spiritual connections and the dopamine tract. vi. The Spiritual Model The “spiritual welder,” explained earlier, examines the mind-body connection from the point of view of gaps or spiritual spaces in the person-making process. The objective is to identify places where spirituality goes sour or to identify the use of non-ordinary coping behaviors to “fix” emotional problems. Spiritual welding and the body’s natural regenerative process play the major role in recovery from substance dependence. Some distinctions appear to be in order. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics isolates four instances of dysfunctional behavior: (1) the self-indulgent person, (2) the incontinent person, (3) the physically ill or damaged person, and (4) the badly habituated person.11 Addiction is a hybrid concept. The most


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blameworthy is the one that arises out of self-indulgence. Such an individual seems to act without regard for consequences and thereby forsakes his humanness. Aristotle thinks that there comes a point when such an individual acts out of necessity—reaching a habit-forming stage where change is problematic. He would not object to calling that stage a disease. The key distinction introduced in this model is not only performing irrational action but continuing to do so in the face of adversity. We can now bring the distinction between illness and disease into full light. The mechanics of spiritual welding suggest that recovery from substance dependence takes place as realignment in the total spectrum of spiritual connections. Recovery from addiction is gradual and entails both a curing and a healing perspective. The curing phase of recovery takes place as the brain gradually begins to produce dopamine again. The healing phase of recovery deals with the mind-body issue of negative emotions. B. Application of Spiritual Concepts to Treatment: Alcoholics Anonymous and the Oxford Group The early years of Alcoholics Anonymous began with the personal experiences of founding members, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, in desperate need of finding relief from alcohol dependence. Wilson and Smith met in Smith’s office to discuss their common alcohol abuse problem. That historic meeting led to the development of a 12-Step program to assist others recovers from alcohol dependence. The founders of A.A. knew from personal experience that recovery was always conditional on not taking that first drink and on continued participation in 12-Step meetings. They believed it possible to heal rather than cure the alcoholic. One drink would rupture biological unity while absence from meetings would rupture mind-body unity. Based on this model, they developed a recovery program based on total abstinence and attendance at A.A. meetings. The goal of a 12-Step program is to provide a medium through which a substance or behavioral dependent subject can return to normal living without the use or abuse of the problem causing substance or behavior. The basic principles of A.A are not scientifically based, though their soundness is established by their successful application in more than one hundred self-help programs worldwide, including narcotics anonymous, gambling anonymous, sex love addictions anonymous, emotions anonymous. While the anonymous nature of A.A. makes obtaining empirical evidence about results difficult, membership being estimated at more than two million people worldwide suggests that something positive is happening in that setting. Members are recruited by attraction. The overt behavioral change and enhanced quality of life of individuals who learn to cope with negative emotions without the use or abuse of alcohol speaks volumes. The goals of

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the program include the development of a positive self-image. Abstinence from alcohol functions as a means towards that end. Recovery from addiction is contingent on the acceptance of spiritual principles. The practice of these principles transforms negative feelings into positive emotions. The A.A. program is simple: it invites the addict to use these principles on a daily basis. What counts is daily spiritual living, not length of time in the program. The formative influences on the developments of A.A. include Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group and Carl Gustav Jung’s correspondence with Bill Wilson. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience12 and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813–1855) “subjective thinker”13 catch the flavor of the 12-Step program. Carl Jung’s recognition of the role spirituality plays in the recovery of some kinds of illnesses like alcohol addiction reinforces Wilson’s personal spiritual experience when he was in the throes of alcoholism. The Oxford Group is an evangelical Christian movement Frank Buchman brought to the United States from Europe in 1917. The practice of four Absolutes (honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love), four Steps (surrender, sharing, restitution, guidance), and the five Cs or required tools to help those in need of assistance: confidence, confession, conviction, conversion, and continuance provide a foundation for the movement. Buchman based his conviction on three fundamental assumptions: (1) God speaks. (2) God has a plan for us. (3) God will reveal His plan if we listen and follow directions. The first Absolute, honesty, appears to be the most demanding of the four because it prescribes a lifestyle in which the relentless pursuit of truth becomes second nature. The Oxford focus on honesty puts in place a rigorous program of vigilance against falsity less falsity creep into our belief system. While maintaining honesty at all levels is crucial, the emphasis is on the pursuit of “divine truth.” According to Buchman, we cannot be true to ourselves without being true to God. The essential feature of the Oxford way of life is to pursue God’s truth as the ultimate meaning of life. The quest for honesty is never ending because the spiritual life unfolds as a process rather than as an event. The next Absolute is total purity. Purity is the means whereby we translate honesty into action. We need to be clean in thought and deed before we can move towards the pursuit of God’s kingdom. In that way, we become an example for others of the benefits of living a spiritual life. Purity, like honesty, is manifest on all levels of the person-making process. As Buchman sees it, purity is being honest “to the best side of our natures, mental, physical, and spiritual.”14 Absolute unselfishness is the necessary response to Absolute love. It means putting God’s will, and the good of other persons, ahead of our desires.


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In the process of putting the desire of others ahead of our own, we demonstrate the centrality of Christ’s love in the world. Absolute love stands as the essence of all of the other Absolutes. The phenomenology of love suggests a “letting be” of the other. To love someone is to say to them “thy will be done” not mine. I love you means that I want what is best for you. To love the other is to find ways to assist their spiritual growth. Love epitomizes honesty because it manifests as a spiritual process of life. Love demands rigorous honesty to ensure that the love we express for others translates into God’s will for us. Love demands absolute unselfishness because it invites reflection on ways to promote the good of others. Love offers self in service to others that God’s will be done. The Four Steps of the Oxford program transfer directly into the development of a program for recovery from substance and behavioral dependence. The first step invokes surrender to God’s will. The realization of that step takes place in an existential decision to move beyond the limits of reason into the realm of subjective truth. The distinction between subjective and objective truth is at play in the admission of substance dependence. This is not to suggest that the category of substance abuse is inappropriate, but that movement from one to the other is not necessarily brought about as a result of a rational decision-making process. The Second Step of the Oxford movement focuses on sharing with others. The step opens as a personal review of the character defects that can keep us away from God. The use of the Absolutes as standard accomplishes that goal: we become aware of the ways in which failure to be honest, pure, unselfish, and loving have kept us from God. They lead to the discovery of character defects: how the individual stands in relation to the rigorous demands of the fellowship. Like-minded individuals share the conversion experience. The exercise is more than an intellectual process because the identification between members takes place at the level of feelings and emotions. This creates a bond between them. The third step is restitution. The goal of that step is to rid ourselves of past mistakes so that we can be of service to others. Patton finds “It is only through restitution that we can be free of our past in order to move into the future God has prepared for us.”15 The A.A. way uses this step to transform negative past experiences into an opportunity to help others. The final step of the Oxford movement is the search for guidance to know God’s will throughout our lives. The use of individual and communal prayers serves that objective. John Batterson wrote the pamphlet “How to Listen to God” as a guide to this sort of prayer.16 In summary, the conditions for receiving God’s guidance include being still, quietly listening, and being honest about every thought that comes into consciousness, testing against the Absolutes to make sure that our thoughts are from God and that we obey God’s call to action.

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The A.A. program integrates the Oxford principles into a 12-Step program. The First Step of the A.A. program rehearses how spirituality can go sour. It affirms the bankruptcy of reason in the depths of a soul torn to hell. The leap into subjectivity expresses the powerlessness of reason before the all-devouring eye of alcohol. Substance dependence brings utter defeat. The addict barely manages the strength to cry for help; God, if there is a God, I am lost, please help me. Objective truth misses this step. The story of that Step can only be told in the spiritual world of agony and defeat, a world of broken promises and dreams, where possibly, hopefully, if there is a God, God will save me! The phenomenon of alcohol or substance dependence, including behavioral dependence, generates a crisis in the life of an individual at the crossroads of hopelessness as the behavior cannot be continued, but nor can it be discontinued. The admission and acceptance of powerlessness over a substance or a behavior is a critical first step to recovery from dependence. Alcoholics Anonymous contains a dozen personal stories of individuals who found themselves in this sort of a bind. They could not continue drinking, but nor could they stop on their own. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. Once the individual is at an end, a fresh spirituality is possible. While promises fill the recovery book, the following stand out: We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being filled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.17 Bill Wilson drew on his personal experiences with alcohol dependence to relax some of the Oxford Group’s strict reliance on rules of conduct. He knew first hand that the alcoholic temperament is better adapted to working with a recommended set of guidelines rather than with strict rules. Wilson wanted to broaden the program’s appeal to include individuals that did not believe in God or religion. The final break came when the Oxford movement took a political turn by endorsing some individuals for elected office. Wilson knew that ego deflation was necessary for recovery and adding personalities and politics to the mix would not work. So he insisted on anony-


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mous membership in A.A. This would not only protect individuals from undesired attention, but it would ensure that personalities did not get in the way of personal recovery. The Traditions began as a series of articles that Wilson wrote for the A.A. periodical The Grapevine to avoid these sorts of mistakes made by the original members of A.A. Over time, the group learned what worked and what to avoid. For instance, the first members soon realized that alcoholism and dishonesty go hand in hand. “Newcomers,” as mentioned in the literature, are incapable of being honest. Neither can newcomers always self-direct their outcomes because of the nature of the disease. They lack the ability to give informed consent. The A.A. movement, though its Steps, Traditions, and Concepts pledges to do for newcomers what they cannot do for themselves, to look after their best interest. Instead of requiring that members stop drinking as a condition of group membership, “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking” (honest or not). Wilson noted these and other key principles and gradually worked them into the new fellowship as the 12-Traditions. He and other A.A. pioneers developed these Traditions over a fifteen-year period before they adopted them as official literature at the first A.A. World Conference in 1950. The details of that formative period are contained in Bill Wilson’s book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. The Conference approved booklet 44 Questions provides answers about the origin and nature of A.A.18 The 12-Step program could not succeed without them. Personal recovery depends upon working the Twelve Steps while adherence to the Twelve Traditions ensures unity of the fellowship. In addition to Steps and Traditions, A.A. has Twelve Concepts for world service. Written by co-founder Bill Wilson in 1962, the Twelve Concepts “provide a group of related principles to help ensure that various elements of A.A.’s service structure remain responsive and responsible to those they serve.” The ethical base that under girds belief in the efficacy of the Steps, Traditions, and Concepts of Alcoholics Anonymous is deontological. In A.A., the value and dignity of the person is primary. The vision is to treat every individual as an end as such with reverence and respect for the dignity of life, even in the face of personal spiritual emptiness. All professional codes of ethics value personal autonomy, beneficence and nonmaleficence, and the collective justice of its members. But ethical codes do not all bring this about in the same way. Consequentialist ethics, for instance, has a tendency to marginalize weaker members of society because it expresses the best interest of the majority of citizens. The best-known form of consequentialism is utilitarianism, a pragmatic ethical theory that decides which ethical rule is in the best interest of the majority of citizens by administering a principle of utility. The course of action that generates the greatest benefit for the majority is the one deemed to be in the best interest of society. The success of democracy depends

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on the autonomy of citizens as they decide by majority vote which course of action is in their best interest. Autonomy depends upon informed consent. A.A. does not marginalize anyone as every member is of equal importance. The A.A. movement cuts across religious beliefs, political views, race, and color as individuals from all occupations abandon their individual differences to join ranks in the struggle against a common problem. Anonymity is a cherished principle. It promotes the deontological equality of all members. Membership in A.A. now numbers over two million people, with nearly 100,800 groups meeting in approximately 150 countries around the world. The growth of A.A. and the establishment of other 12-Step groups is fuelled by a growing number of individuals who have problems with dependency issues. C. Applying A.A. Principles to Other Addictions Some alcoholics appear to be at at-risk of developing dependencies on other drugs or behaviors. The chemistry of addiction is such that the dopamine cycle seems very ready to accept a lateral shift between addiction behaviors as an excuse for not repairing itself. Cocaine use, for instance, produces a powerful high. Cocaine can be injected, snorted, or smoked. The quickest high is from smoking since it only takes eight seconds for it to travel from the lungs to the brain. Cocaine activates the same reward centers of the brain as all other normal pleasures such as food and sex. Cocaine generates a state of pleasure so intense that users describe it in sexual terms. It generates an intense high followed by an immediate, uncontrollable craving for more. It sets up a compulsive cycle to get more cocaine. The high takes place through the brain’s dopamine neurotransmitter system. Communication takes place between cells. Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in this process. A synaptic clef exists between nerve cells. Normally, dopamine passes on from one side of the synaptic clef to the other and reuptake occurs (back to the feeder cell.) This is the case in normal pleasure. Cocaine use prevents this reuptake. The intense pleasure it generates can last up to fifteen minutes, though this high is short lived. The duration of the high induced by cocaine continues to decrease with use, as it drops from fifteen minutes to ten minutes, five minutes, and then it drops down to nothing. This results in depression. So, in the beginning, as the pleasure signal comes down the neuron, cocaine prevents the reuptake back into the first cell so that more of it stays in the second cell, thereby prolonging the pleasure message. The addict will continue to chase that original high, even though it grows less intense with time. The consequences of cocaine use can be fatal. The effects of cocaine use usually begin with lung and membrane problems, but can cause arrhythmia. Cocaine interrupts the electrical activity of the brain. The heart can stop beating, even for a first time user. Still, the insanity of addiction is such that the


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addict will look for a substitute source of pleasure once the effects of cocaine wear off. The high from crystal methamphetamine use, for instance, can last up to ten days, but with even more severe consequences. The design of harm reduction programs, such as methadone, gradually seeks to wean the user back into reality. Most Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.) groups advocate total abstinence from drugs (no shortcuts) and consequently look unfavorably upon methadone users. Because of this, methadone users have formed their own 12-Step group—Methadone Anonymous (M.A.). The person-making process is a harbor for some of the associations that reactivate dependency. Some triggers like a familiar bar, casino, or drug house are obvious, but some environmental connection can be deceptive. Crawford treats the whole person, biologically and spiritually. He refers patients to 12-Step programs, though some chemical dependents are put on a methadone treatment program (harm reduction) for six to twelve months (or longer if necessary,) and referred to Methadone Anonymous (M.A.) The anonymous programs take over the spiritual care phase of recovery. A methadone patient presents in every way as a normal functioning individual. The most unusual application of 12-Step principles I encountered in my research is the existence of a recovery program for individuals with a near death experience (NDE). Its logic appears to be that the afterlife experience is so rich that some individuals do not want to return to this life. These individuals are addicted to, or dependent on—the World Health Organization expressed a preference for that term in 1964—the afterlife. Harm reduction programs appear to be successful as some addicts reenter the work force and stay drug free. Long-term studies (fifteen—twenty years) are not yet available. If successful, harm reduction will have demonstrated that alternative to abstinence exists; keeping in mind that holistic recovery is both spiritual and biological.


Seventeen RECOVERY AS PROCESS Jesus said to her, “My daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.” Luke 8:48 1. Recovery without Cure In 1959, the American Medical Association classified alcoholism as a disease that is progressive and irreversible. This follows on the heels of what Wilson and Smith knew from personal experience, that no cure for alcoholism is possible. Bernard Lenarz of the National Council on Alcoholism and Related Drug Problems, an affiliate of the United States Catholic Conference (NCCA), observes that the intolerance to alcohol continues even after ten to fifteen years of continuous sobriety. The individual that drinks after a long period of sobriety “does not go back to the point of tolerance he was at when he quit drinking, but that a further progression of his inability to ingest alcohol in the normal manner has taken place.”1 The ingestion of alcohol in any amount appears to trigger an involuntary mechanism in the alcoholic to continue drinking. The Executive Director of the National Council on Alcoholism (and the first women member of the A.A. program), Mrs. Marty Mann, has a simple test that she claims no alcoholic can pass: “the limiting of drinks to not more than three on any drinking occasion, even if it is daily, over a six month period.”2 Tom Crawford compares alcoholism to any other disease. If I have diabetes, he says, I have to take insulin or die. If I have alcoholism I have to abstain from alcohol. The vocabulary is consistent with having a disease—that someone has alcoholism rather than someone is an alcoholic! 2. The Role of Honesty in Recovery: Subjective V. Objective Truth In 1937, Psychiatrists at John Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, developed a Twenty-point questionnaire to assist in the identification of alcoholism. While the questionnaire is a straightforward way to identify alcoholism, some individuals are incapable of honesty at treatment entry. These individuals will provide the response that presents them in the best possible light. The critical question is why do some individuals do this while others do not? What led the founders of A.A. to admit to substance dependence rather than being substance abusers? The answer appears to be that the first A.A. members

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recognized and accepted the existence of a truth beyond reason and logic. This is subjective truth—a truth that exists beyond the John Hopkins questionnaire; a truth that cannot be identified or measured by the methodology of the DSM-IV. The distinction in existential philosophy between subjective and objective truth explains this situation. The term objective truth refers to a truth of reason. The truths of science are objective. Empirical facts can verify such truths. The DSM-IV criterion and the John Hopkins measure of alcohol dependence are objectively true, though some alcoholics cannot enter into relationship with that truth. Subjective truth expresses a relationship to objective truth. The A.A. program expresses subjective truth as “willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness.” Subjective truth is essential to recovery because it opens the door to the essential spiritual principles of recovery. The distinction between subjective and objective truth generates four possible configurations. We can be objectively in truth but subjectively in error. For instance, we can be diagnosed as substance dependent but not accept the diagnosis. Alternatively, we can be subjectively in truth and objectively in error. A respondent can claim to be substance dependent from the point of view of subjectivity but not by the objective parameters of the DSMIV. The individual that admits a dependency that exists beyond the range of measurement is open to recovery the A.A. way. Once a client is in recovery for a period, that individual realizes that objective and subjective truth express the same reality from different perspectives. In the worse case situation, the client that does not recover from substance dependence exists in both subjective and objective error, though this condition applies to very few people, “usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.”3 The admission of powerlessness over alcohol, in subjective truth, in the spirit of the Oxford movement, inspired Wilson and Smith to develop Alcoholics Anonymous: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”4 The subjective and objective components of recovery are set side by side in Table 1. Some individuals appear to lack the intestinal fortitude required by that admission and return to alcohol consumption. Perhaps these individuals are blindsided by a distorted sense of objective truth. A temporary return to good health and prosperity following a period of sobriety can create the illusion of a cure. This is termed a “slip.” Many alcohol dependent individuals do not maintain sobriety for a significant period (more than one year.) The program is abstinence based. The use of alcohol or other drugs in even a small amount affects the production of dopamine. This ignites a craving that leads to involuntary drinking. Christiana Ashabo provides insightful details on the cycle of addiction: (1) The craving arises in the mind because of some negative emotion or unpleasant experience; (2) Next comes preoccupation, a state where the mind is very engrossed with thoughts of addictive behavior; (3) Eventually, the cravings become so powerful that they generate compulsive behav-

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ior. The addict engages in harmful activity, or acting out. This brings immediate relief from the tension of the craving, though relief is short lived; (4) Remorse and despair soon follow from giving in to the craving. This behavior generates negative emotions like shame and guilt; (5) Swearing off the behavior is a means of warding off shame and guilt.5 The contrite individual promises never to engage in this behavior again. This is a false sense of control that works for a while to relieve the feelings of guilt and remorse. The belief in the possibility of controlling an involuntary response creates the illusion of freedom. The individual has a choice of two related recovery programs. The first is counseling and psychotherapy. The other is A.A. where the focus is not merely to stop drinking, but to remain stopped and develop spiritual sobriety. Table 1. The Geography of Recovery 12-Step Program both/and Counseling, Psychotherapy Entry: Right-brain insight Awareness Subjective truth Self-admission

Entry: Left-brain insight Referral Objective truth Clinical Assessment

Characteristic: Milder Negative emotions

Characteristic: Hardened Negative Emotions

Goal: Spiritual Growth

Goal: Social Adjustment

Methodology: Abstinence Resonance & identification Spiritual Principles

Methodology: Abstinence/Controlled Drinking Induction/deduction Positive Reinforcement

Results: Positive emotions Personality change The A.A. Promises

Results: Positive emotions Personality change Possible success

Safeguards: Maintenance mechanism*

Safeguards: Reassessment

Group support

Counselor support

*Maintenance mechanism: The A.A. program sets aside five steps to assist the recovering alcoholic’s quest for self-knowledge. The journey into the depths of the psyche is challenging because it leads to a review of negative emotions. The second and third steps facilitate the process by seeking God’s help. How it works is detailed in Alcoholics Anonymous.

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED 3. The Role of Relationship in Recovery

The aspect of A.A. recovery that depends on sharing experiences with others helps explain the success of Wilson’s first meeting with Smith. They failed to do individually what they could do together. They stayed sober by recruiting others into the emerging fellowship. The pioneers met in small groups to discuss their common problem and to draft a formula for recovery based on spiritual principles. They recognized their powerlessness over alcohol and agreed to turn to God (or some Higher Power) for assistance. The willingness to enter into relationship with a Higher Power is essential to the spiritual nature of 12-Step programs. While some members find it difficult to express a dependence on God, they act out of desperation. The need to believe in the existence of something greater than self is essential to recovery. The formula then demands reliance on a “Higher Power” for delivery from substance dependence. Choices are limited because alcoholics are generally “brought to their knees” and have nowhere else to turn for help. They find themselves at a crossroad where they cannot live without a drink but cannot continue drinking and live. They recognize that some alcoholics are maintaining sobriety in this program. These individuals often serve as “Higher Power” because they are accomplishing what to them is the impossible. The newcomer wants their kind of success. Gradually, the definition of a Higher Power sharpens as recovery sets in. Most members eventually come to recognize that God is at work in group meetings. The early fathers seem to have drawn wisdom from the words of Christ, as expressed in the Gospel of Matthew; “Where two or three meet together in my name, I shall be with them.”6 They maintain a shared belief that the condition of alcoholism is progressive and irreversible. 4. Spiritual Recovery Spiritual recovery depends upon the subjective acceptance of a dependency and the objective admission of powerlessness. The subjective acceptance of a medical condition is the gateway to a spiritual healing of mind and body. The objective, clinical, admission of alcoholism as disease, on the other hand, focuses on the organism’s biological unity. This takes place at the clinical level of objective truth. Once that first step is taken (admission and acceptance), the individual is ready to accept belief in the existence of a power greater than self, and willing to turn control over to that Higher Power. We live in an age of control. Control is power and we strive through developments in science and technology to control every aspect of life and death. The discovery of the human genome has added to our power base giving us the ability to eliminate undesirable characteristics in our species. We can genetically engineer the next generation of children, animals, and organ-

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isms. We pick the time of birth and the time of death. We write living wills and decide when to execute a “final exit.” The relentless ability to control other persons, the environment, and now the genetic code of life gives us a false sense of pride. The psychological principles that accompany the need for power generate negative spiritual connections. We drink, drug, gamble, shop, and use sexual encounters to fix things we cannot control. The spiritual tendency continues to express the need to belong to something greater than ourselves. We mistakenly direct the tendency towards the fulfillment of selfish ambitions. But human spirituality is designed primarily to express love, compassion, in service of others. Negative spiritual connectors lead us to pursue control, power, greed, pride, lust, and personal bottoms. Perhaps science and technology will discover the genetic basis of alcoholism and substitute a protein to allow some alcohol dependent clients to engage in controlled drinking. But would the protein fix negative emotions? The technological fix does not extend to the subjective component because the central issue is coping with personal suffering. I expect that the “protein fix,” if one becomes available, will be accompanied by an unanticipated lateral movement in the addict’s brain to shift to alternate ways of fixing negative emotions. William James the great American psychologist, teacher, and physicist suffered recurring bouts with depression. The failure to justify belief in the moral universe on empirical grounds is what brought about his depression. Ralph Barton Perry reports that on 1 February 1870, James recorded an entry in his diary that any alcoholic would recognize: Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one suited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it? I will give the latter alternative a fair trial. Who knows but the moral interest may become developed.7 The reading of Charles Renouvier marks a turning point in the life of William James because Renouvier provides grounds for believing in the efficacy of the will “The sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts.” My first act of free will, James says, “shall be to believe in free will.”8 Out of the ashes of objective truth rises the subjective belief in the possibility of a moral life. The turning marks the birth of James the ethicist. If the subjective focus plays an essential role in “conversion” experience of Wilson, Smith, and now James, the honor for the most passionate development of the role of subjectivity in a human life goes to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is alarmed at the failure of rationalist philosophers to make sense of religion from the objective point of view. How, for instance, can the instructions God gives Abraham to slay Isaac make ethical sense? God seems to be on the side of direct and willful killing. Kierkegaard opens the investiga-

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tion into the nature of Christianity with a study of the contrast between faith and reason. Reason and faith emerge as polar opposites. His journey towards God forces him to decide between the choices announced in his first major work Either/Or published in 1843.9 It establishes a dialectical movement between reason and faith and points the way to a higher truth towards the transcendent, though the process is not clear to him. His second work Fear and Trembling published the same year explains why he cannot make sense of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac.10 He makes us feel the intensity of Abraham’s pain, but cannot explain how Abraham’s action is ethical while breaking God’s law against killing. He suspects that the religious way, from the point of view of Christianity, must lie beyond the ethical law. The moment of awakening dawns on him as he imagines that faith uses personal suffering to trump reason. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscripts published in 1846, unpacks how the process of becoming a Christian moves dialectically on the arms of the life of reason and the life without ethical commitment. Personal events in Kierkegaard’s life—a troubled devotion to his father, a running confrontation with the local press (the Corsair), a melancholic disposition, an unrequited love affair, a rejected manuscript . . . the expression of his grief in The Concept of Dread, published in 1844, ensure a steady stream of suffering in his short life.11 Kierkegaard’s lifelong challenge on how to become a Christian is finally answered towards the end of his life with the discovery of subjective truth. He finally understood Abraham’s Christianity. He calls him the “hero of the faith.” Precisely because Abraham chooses to have faith in God instead of trying to understand Him, God spared his son, Isaac. Faith is seen to arise through pain and suffering as an invitation to God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Kierkegaard realizes that the Christian life arises out of the weakness of the individual hopelessly waiting for God’s help rather than in the alleged strength of the ethical individual with abstract knowledge of God’s laws. Being a Christian calls for den Enkelte (purity of heart) plunge into the arms of God. The Christian lets go of the security and comfort of reason to risk all for the love of Christ. The Christian suffers the anxiety of the tightrope walker working without a net. The focus is on the relationship to God only, not on the objective truth of God’s laws. The tension between jumping into the arms of the godhead and hanging on to reason is great. The decision to forego reason in the name of faith is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The decision to let go and let God generates a great spiritual awakening. God comes to the subjective thinker at the time of greatest need. The reward is infinite. The individual that leaps into subjective truth gains eternal life. What James and Kierkegaard say about subjective truth has an obvious application to the spiritual character of recovery from substance dependence. Recovery depends upon the ability to let go of reason or objective truth and to trust in the existence of something greater than the self. The key word here is

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suffering since it directs the spiritual tendency. Addiction causes suffering. James’s inability to justify belief in the moral life causes suffering. Kierkegaard’s struggle with the ethical dimension of Christianity causes suffering. He sees suffering as an opportunity to invite God to come into our life. God uses suffering as an opportunity to raise the individual above objective truth into subjective truth. The existence of subjective truth serves the agenda of turning an unmanageable source of pain (addiction, how to be a Christian, how is the moral life possible) to this Power Greater than the self (God, the leap of faith, the Will to Believe.) A loving, spiritual tendency fuels his decision. Major world religions struggle with suffering, not only to make sense of why God allows the suffering of innocent victims, but also to discover why destruction and death fill the world. The Abraham religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) recognize that while humankind is partially responsible for the state of the world, the faithful enter into personal relationship with the God of love through personal suffering. Christianity’s focus on the Trinity affirms that God knows suffering first hand through Christ. The way Christ turned his suffering over to God the Father serves as a model for the faithful, especially the willingness of Christ to let the will of the Father prevail over his own. The recognition that suffering plays a focal role in the life of self is equally apparent in religions of the East where the emphasis is on moving out of the self. The religions of the East (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, if we view China’s Confucianism separate from its political ideology) recognize that suffering is caused by the distance that exists between the self and the all of being. Buddhists say that the practice of the Noble Eightfold Path removes the cause of suffering. The Buddhist precepts (not to kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie, and consume intoxicants) are like the commandments of Christian religion. The practice of these recommendations generates the healthy lifestyle, or good karma. The practice of right action or good karma disarms suffering by removing its main cause—clinging to self. The ultimate goal of Buddhism is to end the cycle of rebirth by merging with the All of existence. The invitation to move away from the self is equally central to the success of 12-Step programs. We can draw a connection between Buddhist precepts and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous with respect to the New Testament Bible. The Christian story centers on the redemptive nature of suffering. In the agony in the Garden, sorrow and distress overwhelm Jesus. He prays to the divine Father: “My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass me by. Still, let it be as you would have it, not as I.”12 The crucifixion narrative details the story of an individual beaten and abandoned, left to hang and die on a cross. The individual left to hang and dry on the altar of alcohol dependence can identify with the story of a broken Jesus. The Jesus narrative tells the story of a broken man, an individual aban-

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doned by everyone, betrayed by his closest friend, and subjected to the indignities of crucifixion. Jesus, a man of love, had to hang with cutthroat bandits, though one repented and asked forgiveness of the Lord. The broken alcoholic can identify with the plight of the bandit, if not the Christian story of the broken Jesus. All major world religions have similar tales of brokenness, from Siddhartha Gautama’s Buddhism, the Dalai Lama’s expression of concern for others as the unifying characteristic of spirituality, to mother Theresa of Calcutta’s compassion for the poor. The admission of powerlessness over alcohol and the expression of a desire to stop drinking begin a process of recovery or personality change as the recovering addict begins to experience positive emotions. The individual who willingly takes these steps turns defeat into spiritual victory. It takes courage, and humility to turn the control of a personal life over to anyone, even God or a Higher Power. Some individuals prefer to maintain personal autonomy and seek out alternate movements such as Rational Recovery (R.R.). This cognitively based approach to alcohol dependence approaches the problem with behavior modification. The focus makes positive reinforcement contingent on controlled drinking. By comparison, the A.A. way recognizes and accepts the sterility of a cognitively based approach to controlled drinking (step one.) The movement away from self is a spiritually based belief that “God might do for us what we could not do for ourselves.” The focus in a 12-Step program is more on spiritual growth than on stopping drinking. Anyone can stop drinking (or using.) The point is to feel good about it. Abstinence from alcohol (or drug of choice) functions as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. The long-term success rate of Rational Recovery is doubtful. Bernard Lenarz puts it this way: “I have found that those who only make the first step and who do not try to develop spiritually, do not try to become better men and women, just simply do not remain sober.”13 I find it interesting that negative emotions such as depression and desperation provide the ground for a spiritual insight. The decision to turn things over to the care of God comes out of defeat and leads to a spiritual belief that (in their words) “God can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We have made a mess of running our life. We now trust God to take care of things for us.” This insight is a spiritual awakening and provides a solid ground for the beginnings of recovery. The substance dependent can finally begin the arduous process of rebuilding relationships. To turn things over to the care of God is not to sit idle and do nothing. Self-help movements are not passive. The focus is on the diligent use of recommended steps for individual recovery. At some point in recovery, some of the “promises” listed earlier begin to materialize. To turn control over to God is to act faithfully while leaving the results or outcome of action to God.

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Spirituality as a loving tendency promotes an inward journey towards the conquest of self. This is a central characteristic of recovery programs. The focus in major World Religions is relative to a cultural environment. The faithful express religion as a journey of purification towards, God, Allah, the Blessed Trinity, Buddha, or the All of existence, a power greater than the self. Likewise, recovery movements focus on moving out of self-will toward God’s Will (Table 2): Table 2. Contrasting negative emotions of self-will with positive emotions of God’s Will. (List prepared by William Roach). Self-Will (negative emotions) Selfishness and self-seeking Dishonesty Cowardice Thoughtlessness Pride Greed Lustfulness Anger Envy Sloth Gluttony Impatience Intolerance Resentment Hate Harmful acts Self-pity Self-justification Self-importance Self-condemnation Suspicion Doubt

God’s Will (positive emotions) Selflessness Honesty Courage Thoughtfulness Humility; seeking God’s will Generosity Charity Calm Gratitude Liveliness Moderation Patience Tolerance Forgiveness Love; concern for others Good deeds Self-forgetfulness Humility; seek God’s will Modesty Self-forgiveness Trust Faith

The process of moving from self-will to God’s will takes place through the three arms of the person-making process. The Matthean text “The Laborers in the Vineyard” explains that God offers recovery to everyone equally: The reign of God is like the case of the owner of an estate who went out at dawn to hire workers for his vineyard. After reaching an agreement with them for the usual daily wage, he sent them out to his vineyard. He came out about midmorning and saw other men standing around the marketplace without work, so he said to them, “You too go along to my

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THE CURVE OF THE SACRED vineyard and I will pay you whatever is fair.” At that, they went away. He came out again around noon and midafternoon and did the same. Finally, going out in late afternoon he found still others standing around. To these he said, “Why have you been standing here idle all day?” “No one has hired us,” they told him. He said, “You go to the vineyard too.” When evening came the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, “Call the workmen and give them their pay, but begin with the last group and end with the first.” When those hired in the afternoon came up they received a full day’s pay, and when the first group appeared, they supposed they would get more; yet they received the same daily wage. Thereupon they complained to the owner, “This last group did only an hour’s work, but you have put them on the same basis as us who have worked a full day in the scorching heat.” “My friend,” he said to one in reply, ‘I do you no injustice. You agreed on the usual wage, did you not? Take your pay and go home. I intend to give this man who was hired last the same pay as you. I am free to do as I please with my money, am I not? Or are you envious because I am generous?” Thus the last shall be first and the first shall be last.14

This passage contains a wonderful message, though perhaps not one that rings true to anyone from a trade union. The message is not about a fair wage or just pay. Biblical expert Felix Just interprets the reading as providing instruction to Christians to be happy for others. That view applies to the mentality of recovery programs. The recovering addict shifts the focus away from selfishness whether greed, anger, envy or some other negative emotion to rejoice in the well-being of others. Jesus gave his life that others might live. The reading is an invitation to think about others. The passage brings to light some of the spiritual principles of A.A. such as a fundamental belief in the dignity and equality of all members. A member with thirty years of continuous sobriety is not superior to the newcomer. Everyone receives the same treatment. The program is based on a philosophy of living one day at a time; a belief that anchors the substance dependent in the immediacy of the present. The fellowship could not exist in a competitive environment. The goal is not to compare personal stories of pain, but to identify as suffering individuals traveling the same path towards recovery (resonance and identification.) Recovery does not begin at the same time for everyone. Some arrive early, while others arrive late in the day. Some never get there and die! In the next section, we will turn to an examination of recovery in light of the personmaking process.

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5. The Self as Structure We have examined three of the roads leading to the formation of an “I,” namely, a social-self, an environmental-self, and a central-self. The structured self as “I” owes its origin to these three streams of associations. The centralself is the locus of the particular sensations or impressions we received from others and the world. The “I” reflects on the particulars of associations taking place in the central, social, and environmental-self to disengage the meaning of life. Here the command to institute and vary relationships takes place. Spirituality fuels the self in the task of becoming personal because we do so in accordance with the embedded script of divine likeness. We are moved towards the image of God. We do not attain the divine image in this life because of the fleetingness of sensations and our temporal horizon. We act on the installment plan, moving on from goal to goal towards the realization of the ultimate goal—seeing God face to face—promised in the Genesis text. The spiritual as loving tendency towards the sacred provides the trust needed to move the intellect into action, and the will into entering into personal relationship with God. The road to recovery includes a journey into the spiritual world of the interior self where weakness abounds. Higher Power of Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, works best in an environment where weakness abounds. The belief is not that God chooses the strong, but that God makes strong the chosen. A significant characteristic of Scriptures is that Jesus always chooses the weak to do significant work. Jesus chose Peter as the cornerstone of His church because Peter was weak. Matthew was a tax collector (the tax collector of the Old Testament was not above reproach since he usually kept a portion of the collection for personal gain.) Jesus’ disciples were mainly fishers— individuals with little skill. Jesus did not go to royalty or to the rich to recruit disciples because the rich would generally be unwilling to give up possessions to follow Him. Jesus came for sinners. He taught that the human heart had to be pure to make room for the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. The laws of the Spirit direct us towards love of God and neighbor (spirituality as loving tendency.) Individuals in recovery are fully immersed in the evils of spirituality gone sour (the seven deadly sins): pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth. But Jesus offers them peace, saying, “Your sins are forgiven, go and sin no more.” He does not come to judge and punish the recovering addict, but to open the gates of hell and let them out. Two main factors determine the active alcoholic temperament. No one is born with negative emotions, but at some point, the drinking trajectory, brain chemistry, and negative emotions become interdependent variables; negative emotions precipitate drinking behavior and drinking behavior generates nega-

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tive emotion. Alcoholics have poor social skills and language skills deficit. They tend to be isolated. Thomas Donovan provides an interesting account of negative emotional states. After many years of drinking, a substance-dependent individual becomes self-centered: “After a man has abused alcohol for a long period of time, he becomes so intent on having the whole world his own way, that he cannot conceive of any valid opposition to his wishes.” Egotism leads to an enormous amount of false pride. Donovan remarks on the ease with which active alcoholics lie. They know that their addiction to alcohol is something that will not be accepted and begin lying as a way of gaining acceptance; “And they will lie without hesitation, and quite cheerfully.” Closely tied to this is the alcoholic’s fearfulness. The alcoholic is afraid of being found out and must cover up for past mistakes: His world is a world of ogres, of people out to disturb him, of people out to hold him to account. He knows that he dare not meet these people, and his fear will drive him from one thing to another, and from one place to another, and from all sorts of irrational conduct.15 The active alcoholic is on a path to spiritual destruction. Negative emotions brought on by egotism, pride, lying, fear, shame, remorse, guilt, and anxieties lead to depression, death, tragedies, and death. The key to recovery, if one is found, is not in chastising the alcoholic (who may no longer be autonomous because of the obsessive and compulsive effects of the cycle of addiction) but in the alcoholic’s ability to identify with the emotional state of an alcoholic in recovery. The addict in recovery will talk about what living the web of deceit was like, what happened to change things, and what life in recovery is like. In the process of telling this story, some individuals will recognize their own pattern of abuse. The change of heart or process of recovery begins at this point as the individual comes to believe that what worked for others might work for them. The awareness generates the beginning of a new life in the company of others in recovery. The first step towards recovery, then, is admission of substance or behavioral dependence and the identification with others suffering from the same dysfunctional disease. The reform of spirituality takes place through the instrumentality of the other in recovery. A spiritual awakening takes place as the addict in recovery begins a lifelong journey into acceptance, courage, and wisdom. The Serenity prayer, written in 1926 by Reinhold Niebuhr, a Lutheran Pastor and theologian, is a plea to God for courage and wisdom required to undergo a journey of recovery. A.A. adopted it worldwide:

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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference. Living One day at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did, this world as it is, Not as I would have it. Trusting that God will make things right If I surrender to His will; That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him Forever in the next. From the point of view of the disease model, the success of recovery depends on subjective factors such as recognition, acceptance, willingness, identification, (objective) detoxification, and, on occasion, counseling. But most alcohol dependent individuals prefer to present themselves as substance abusers rather than as addicts. Counseling and psychotherapy can be successful in breaking the stereotypical need to be in control, if only to open the door out of scientific analysis into the subjective sanctuary of a 12-Step program. This is the home of spiritual recovery. Bill Wilson claims that a spiritual awakening accompanied his recovery from alcohol dependence. He provided some of the details in a letter he wrote to Carl Jung in 1961. His spiritual experience happened in 1934, as he was taking treatment for alcohol abuse at Towns Hospital in New York City. By his own admission, he was in the last stages of alcoholism and found himself reaching out to God for help. His letter to Jung contains the following sentence: “All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything.” At that exact moment, he said, there was the unmistakable presence of some intangible element in his room (a white light.) He claimed that a moment of conversion was upon him, a moment of inexpressible ecstasy, which words could not describe. He was in the presence of the Sacred: “I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.” His doctor, William Duncan Silkworth, could see from the look in his patient’s eyes that he had found something and instructed him to hold on to it. Bill Wilson never drank again.16 The kind of conversion experienced by Wilson is rare, though some recovering addicts report similar experiences. Recovery from the depths of alcohol depression is generally a slow process. Carl Jung was one of the first psychologists to recognize the role of spirituality in substance dependence. Jung had been unsuccessfully working with an alcoholic at the time (Roland H) and thought that the A.A. program


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could help where analytical psychology failed. Jung wrote a letter to Bill Wilson expressing that belief: Dear Mr. W.: Your letter has been very welcome indeed. I had no news from Roland H. any more and often wondered what has been his fate. Our conversation which he has adequately reported to you had an aspect of which he did not know. The reason that I could not tell him everything was that in those days I had to be exceedingly careful of what I said. I had found out that I was misunderstood in every possible way. Thus I was very careful when I talked to Roland H. But what I really thought about was the result of many experiences with men of his kind. His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God . . . You might be led to that goal . . . through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of rationalism. I see from your letter that Roland H. has chosen (this) way, which was, under the circumstances, obviously the best one . . . . You see, alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.17 The concept of the spiritual as loving tendency towards God raises questions concerning God’s nature. We seek to form a mental picture of God. The problem is that the nature of God transcends the categories of human understanding. We cannot relate to God from the point of view of objective truth. Our dependence on God, we see in the work of Kierkegaard, exists in subjective truth. The focus is on the relationship itself rather than on the object of relationship. The addict that seeks help does so out of necessity. Life has become unmanageable. Hopelessness precipitates the turn to God. The God of compassion hears the cry for help, not the God of reason. Bill Wilson’s plea to God is “if there is a God.” His prayer is born out of desperation, not insight. He enters into personal relationship with God that God might do for him what he cannot do for himself; namely, stop drinking. While this is taking place at the level of subjective truth, subjectivity is not without logic. Every logical attempt to control drinking has failed. The solution to the dilemma of substance dependence is that the individual has a necessary connection to the godhead. The individual appeals to the divinity within to provide sanctuary. The substance dependent individual enters into subjective relationship with a personal God. This ready-at-hand God explains, I think, the ongoing fascination, in good times and in bad times, we have with the (Anselm of Canterbury) ontological argument. The existence of a being “greater than which none can be found” manifests itself in consciousness, perhaps no more vividly

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than at times of crisis. The God of subjective truth stands between the alcoholic and death. Alcoholics Anonymous is not a religion, though spirituality animates its teachings. The “Sermon on the Mount” relates to the 12-Step program. In particular, the text of Matthew applies to the substance dependent at treatment entry: How Blest are the poor in spirit; the reign of God is theirs Blest too are the sorrowing; they shall be consoled. Blest are the lowly; they shall inherit the land. Blest are they who hunger and thirst for holiness; they shall have their fill.18 The Bible texts promise sanctuary for those seeking protection from addiction: “Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you.”19 This text suggests that God’s love conquers all. The biblical story of The Prodigal Son provides a good illustration of God’s forgiveness. The story tells how there was once a man who had two sons. One son asked for his inheritance and after squandering it returned to the father hoping for forgiveness; “He ran out to meet him, threw his arms around his neck, and kissed him.”20 The story announces the heavenly Father’s forgiveness. God’s love for us is told in the story of the Good Shepherd.21 God understands our weakness. Jesus chose his disciples from the weak—Matthew was a tax collector—not respected by the society of the day because they tended to fill their pockets. God helps those in need “Ask, and you will receive.”22 God does not judge, or condemn; He comes to comfort the afflicted and promise a better life. We enter into personal relationship (subjective truth) with God through other people. We form an image of a personal God, one that shares joys and sorrows with us. The God of Abraham’s religion is not an abstract distant Absolute. He exists in other persons (the social-self). The spiritual nature of loving others is evident in the text of John: And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my disciples.23 The principle of love underscores Twelve-Step programs. The five inventory steps offer an opportunity to look within the self (through the associations that characterize us) to discover precisely how and when we failed to treat others with respect and dignity. It offers insight into why we broke promises, and why we used others to accomplish selfish ends. The inner work begins once the client is detoxified and the dopamine tracts are given time to regenerate.

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Spirituality continues to cleanse the divine image muddied by addiction. The psychological principles that accompany recovery from substance dependence suggest a willingness to examine the contents of negative emotions. To do so we suspend everything that interferes with pure listening and allow the contents of the unconscious to percolate in the forefront of consciousness. We strive to rid ourselves of the tendency to be controlled by the “seven deadly sins” and allow personal insecurities an opportunity to become manifest. The recovery process takes time. The process is often painful as negative emotions are a reminder of spirituality gone sour. They rise out of the depths of psyche to stand in consciousness as epitaphs to remind us of lost battles in the struggle of good over evil. Gradually we begin to accept ourselves, and negative emotions begin to lose their hold over us. We face the contents of the unconscious, not to censor or feel guilt about negative experiences, but to befriend our demons and possibly use the experience to help others in recovery. The process begins in the dark hour of addiction, but like the characters in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we gradually move out of the world of shadows to step into the sunny world of inner peace. This, I think is what motivated Bill Wilson as he felt the need to bring others into the sunlight of recovery. In recovery, we notice that the feelings and attitudes we carry towards others belie our insecurities and fears. We notice that the love we have for others grows as we learn to love and forgive ourselves. We turn to God the loving Father and ask Him to remove our character defects. Recovery begins as we learn to manifest less resentment, less pride, less envy than before. We will have the spiritual experience envisioned by the founders of A.A.: “You will know what it means to give of yourself that others may survive and rediscover life. You will learn the full meaning of “love thy neighbor as thyself.”24 A. Acknowledging the Social-self in Recovery Alcoholics Anonymous members do not necessarily follow the 12-Steps in numeric order. Bill Wilson began his personal recovery with making amends to others. Some individuals prefer to deal with the personal inventory steps (the central-self) before seeking to make amends (the social-self). We have to take ownership of mistakes made at the social level—spouse, children, parents, friends, co-workers, and society-at-large. We have to be honest with ourselves and make sincere apologies to the people affected by our behavior. Perhaps some of the people we have hurt are people who have hurt us, but the A.A. program details how we (selfishly) need to make amends for our sake not for the sake of others. If we do use others as “hooks” to manifest our insecurities (as Jungian analysis suggests,) it could be beneficial to begin the recovery process with the central-self rather than the social-self. In the absence of a maintenance program within the social context of a support structure—the role of the sponsor in A.A. is crucial—the individual

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risks relapse, or possibly shifting addictions by substituting one compulsive, obsessive, behavior for another. The addict can then go from the frying pan into the fire. B. Addressing the Environmental-self in Recovery Shepard Siegel’s study of heroin use provides a glimpse into the role of the environment in the person-making process; Siegel reasoned that the tolerance to heroin was partly conditioned to the environment where the drug was normally administered. If the drug is consumed in a new setting, much of the conditioned tolerance will disappear, and the addict will be more likely to overdose.25 Siegel’s study confirms the belief that the environment occupies a central role in the person-making process. We are an extension of the environment. The environmental connection warns the body that an invasion of foreign substance (heroin) is imminent, providing an opportunity for the immune system to mount a defense. Ingesting the substance in an unfamiliar environment increases the likelihood of dying from an overdose. Since a drug or substance is always ingested somewhere the environmental connection triggers negative emotional states such as fear, pride, lust, greed, and the like that are usually associated with substance dependence. The tendency to pollute, exploit, and disrespect the environment grows out of these negative emotions. Once we become aware of the presence of negative spiritual connections, the process of re-establishing new connections exists. The ability to see God in the environment, the desire to clean the environment, the willingness to allow nature time to heal herself . . . are deeply spiritual acts. These practices are born of positive emotions. Positive emotions and the desire for environmental healing trigger the use of a technology that respects the being of things. The key to a positive environmental-self is to respect the being of things. The person in recovery needs to establish a fresh network of friends or associates, less old acquaintances trigger unwelcome social flashbacks. The shift from a Cartesian view of the other as external to self to the view of the self as extension of others expresses that reality. The individual develops a negative self-image by dealing with drug dealers (the dealer disempowers the user.) If recovery is to be successful, the individual in recovery can no longer associate with drug dealers, active alcoholics, gamblers, sex addicts, or other negative influences. The individual needs to establish fresh spiritual connections with other human beings before recovery, and a change of attitude can begin. We need to let go of individuals that disempower us and begin anew the social face of becoming persons. The 12-Step approach to recovery works

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because it draws from a new social network of individuals in recovery. The fundamental equality of participants and the desire to empower everyone generates the A.A. social support system. The AA sponsor system is an outcrop of that fellowship. Maintaining an active program, ongoing communication with God through other persons in recovery, averts the shift between addictions. The desire to step outside the confines of the personal ego to help others is a necessary condition for recovery. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous is deeply spiritual because it teaches us how to move on from alcohol-induced selfish values to values that celebrate the loving presence of God on the arms of the person-making process. Prayer is being present to God and allowing God to be present to us through these associations. (1) Addiction undermines autonomy and self-esteem. We learn to love ourselves as we move away from the control of negative emotions to the discovery of the divine image within psyche. (2) The social-self teaches us that we can identify with others and become one with them in recovery. We grow in love by giving love away. (3) The environmental-self matures as we discover the presence of the Sacred in nature. The spirituality of First Nation people provides an excellent illustration of a spirituality rooted in the respect of nature. The chapter seems to be incomplete without mention of the format used in 12-Step A.A. meetings. The local newspapers usually serve notices of meeting times and places, or the novice can call an A.A. helpline for assistance. A.A. has two types of meetings—closed and open—and two main formats—discussion and speaker. The closed meeting is reserved for individuals that have a desire to stop drinking. The open meeting is for everyone else that has an interest in knowing more about recovery from alcohol dependence. A.A. promises anonymity at both open and closed meetings. The discussion meeting invites discussion topics from the floor of the meeting while speaker meetings invite one or two speakers to share their experiences, strengths, and hopes with the group. The newcomer need not say anything. A.A. meetings last about an hour. The honesty and openness of participants as they share personal stories of dependence and recovery from addiction stand out. The dialogue takes place at the subjective emotional level of experience. The atmosphere is one of spirituality in action as speaker after speaker demonstrates an attitude of wanting to be a better person. The key to spiritual growth lies in resonance, identification, compassion, and acceptance of the other. After a few minutes of discussion, attendees feel the presence of an intangible element in the air. While some individuals can write off this presence as existing only in the sensitivity of the right frontal lobe, others know better. If the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, recovery from hopelessness gives evidence of success. The individuals joined in recovery are not alone as God is doing for

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them what they could not do for themselves. They are learning a new spiritual way of life and will soon experience the A.A. Promises. 6. Concluding Remarks We have examined the following questions in this chapter: (1) How do I become compassionate? (2) What is holistic health? (3) What is spirituality? (4) What is existential restlessness? (5) What is spiritual welding? (6) What role does the person-making process play in holistic health? (7) What is the Transcendent? (8) What is the connection between the search for meaning and the Transcendent? (9) How does inner work lead to spirituality, meaning and transcendence (SMT)? (10) How does work on the social-self lead to SMT? (11) How does work on the environmental-self lead to SMT? (12) How do I put spirituality on bad diets? Recovery from substance dependency works best when the individual not only recognizes the existence of a dependency but also asks for help. Recovery from substance dependence is a two-step process. First, medicine (medical model) treats the disease of addiction. Successful treatment appears to be contingent on abstinence since the ingestion of alcohol, in any amount, lulls the dopamine cycle into a false sense of security. Second, arresting the progression of the disease allows the client to focus on alcoholism as mindbody illness. A 12-Step program or some other community intervention helps the patient accomplish this. The social-self plays a vital role in the success of such groups. While the medical approach to dependency strives to restore the organism’s biological unity, the 12-Step approach restores the integrity of the mind-body connection. So the focus is not only on curing (biological unity) the disease of alcoholism, but on healing (mind-body unit) the alcoholic’s worldview. Substance dependence is both a spiritual problem and a biological problem. What is needed is an interdisciplinary approach to a complex problem—the one from the point of view of science, the other from the point of view of spiritual principles. Once the medical community restores the organism’s biological unity, the individual can revisit spiritual connectors to unplug negative emotions. Holistic recovery arises as the loving tendency towards God or Higher Power makes new spiritual connections. The 12-Step environment is a wonderful breeding ground for that sort of healing work.


Eighteen SPIRITUALITY AND HUMAN DEATH 1. Philosophy and Spirituality Nothing surpasses the anxiety that Jesus must have felt in the Garden of Olives on the eve of his death. Jesus, as God, knew He would rise from the dead, but he could not have known this as a man. We have to think that his human agony was genuine, that he expressed anxiety and felt pain, humiliation, defeat, disappointment, and abandonment; “My heart is nearly broken with sorrow. Remain here and stay awake with me.” Jesus fell prostrate in prayer: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by. Still, let it be as you would have it, not as I.” When he returned to his disciples, he found them asleep and said to Peter: “Be on guard, and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing but nature is weak.” Withdrawing a second time Jesus said: “My Father, if this cannot pass me by without my drinking it, your will be done.” Once more, on his return, he found his disciples asleep. He left them and began to pray a third time, saying the same words as before. Finally, he returned to them and said to them: Sleep on now. Enjoy your rest! The hour is on us when the Son of Man is to be handed over to the power of evil men. Get up! Let us be on our way! See, my betrayer is here. The Sanhedrin mocked and mistreated Jesus as he stood before them. In the courtyard, even Peter, his chosen successor, abandoned him. Three times the apostle denied knowing him. Jesus was condemned, crowned with thorns and scourged. Then they crucified and put him to death. Jesus cried out in anguish: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”1 Jesus then turned his life over to the will of God: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”2 After he said this, he died. The agony and death of Jesus provides insight into the paradoxical character of death. The phenomenon of human death is simultaneously timely and untimely, personal and impersonal, a source of inspiration, and a source of despair. We know that personal death is an integral part of our finitude. We know that we cannot think of ourselves as being dead because we cannot think of ourselves as not thinking. We experience ourselves as temporal while knowing ourselves to be not temporal. Jesus as man faces this paradox for he knows himself to be at an end. Jesus as divine knows Himself to be facing this paradox for He knows Himself as non-temporal. The ways of Jesus provide a guide or solution to the paradox of death, a solution that raises death to a fresh

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level of insight. The temporal dimension of being human stands in subjective truth in the face of personal death. We know that death is not the end of our personal existence, but we have to die to realize ourselves as not ending. In “fear and trembling” in subjective truth, we surrender our will to the objective character of death, knowing that God uses personal death to raise us above the objective fact of coming to an end. The death and resurrection of Jesus teaches us the way. Three central elements emerge from the spiritual character of death, namely, (1) letting go of control, (2) trusting God, and (3) forgiving others; “Father forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.”3 The first step towards the study of this spiritual paradox is to examine the nature of death as such (what death is like to the dead.) I have examined the distinction between death as such and death as it appears to the living elsewhere, but will draw upon it to explain what, in my opinion, is spiritual about death.4 For most of us death is the unwanted and unknown event that ends life. We usually think of death as being the irreversible loss of consciousness. While this view is plausible from the point of view of science, it provides no insight into the spiritual character of death as such. We can adopt one of two attitudes towards our final ending. One way is to view death as being an event, something that happens to everyone someday. We strive to put it off as long as possible. The result is that when death does come to us, we are unprepared for it. Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) classic story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, illustrates this theme as Ivan does not get the meaning of life until he finds out (too late) he is going to die.5 The other more promising approach to personal death is to view it as being a process of life. Martin Heidegger’s (1884–1976) Being and Time contains a seminal study that shows how death as personal process functions as source of inspiration. In that insightful, pioneering study about death, Heidegger shows how death as “utmost possibility of impossibility” is integral to being a person.6 We live until we run out of death. The advantage of this view is that it leaves no one unprepared for the grim reaper’s appearance. We learn to live each day as if there was no tomorrow. The belief provides a good way, not only to live life to the full, but to make sure that nothing that can be or should be done today gets put off until tomorrow. One of the undesirable consequences of viewing death as process is that it apparently puts the individual in control of death. On the contrary, the death of Jesus raises the specter of death to a higher level beyond process to the removal of the possibility of controlling death. This view returns us to the distinction between the personal experience of death (whether as event or process), and death as such. While we can understand the nature of death as personal as the total and irrevocable loss of consciousness, the nature of death as such lies in the removal of the possibility of that loss. In order to address the nature of death as such I have to move out of consciousness. The focus on death from the point of view of consciousness is all I have now. Nevertheless,


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if death is something to the dead, a state of activity or passivity, then, I need move out of consciousness to grasp an insight into the nature of that state. How is this possible; how can the living step outside of consciousness to gain some insight into the nature of death as such? Once I step outside of consciousness, I no longer understand anything. Still, I can explain something I do not understand. I do this by going to being and focusing on being’s unconcealment as the objective correlate of consciousness. The doctrine of the primacy of existence suggests that being’s unconcealment expresses the root of the possibility of being in a state in which I am more or less conscious. Following that logic, we do not look to the estrangement of consciousness before being for an answer, but to being’s refusal to be for consciousness. I stress this difference to explain how the death of Jesus reveals the possibility of being spiritual as it moves outside the possibility of personal control to the root of the possibility of being in control. The Matthean text of Jesus’ agony in the garden elucidates that at one level, Jesus seeks to control his death by asking the Father to let this “cup” pass him by. I think this approach is human and understandable. He is, in this instance, acting in “the likeness of God.” The foundational character of being spiritual surfaces as Jesus becomes willing to let go of (human control) to move towards the divine image. He finally says to the Father, “Let it be as you would have it.” In doing so, Jesus moves from the epistemological attempt to control death to a metaphysical acceptance of death. At this point, the distinction between using reason to make sense of death (objective truth) and letting go of reason (subjective truth) to gain insight into the nature of death is transparent. The essential thing from the point of view of spirituality is how we enter into relationship with personal death. Jesus moves out of consciousness and the objective control of death to enter into relationship with death from the point of view of subjectivity. This movement is at the core of being a Christian, as embodied in Søren Kierkegaard’s subjective truth. What counts about being a Christian is not what I can understand by the use of reason alone, but my willingness to let go of reason and trust God. We have before us two essential characteristics of genuine or authentic spirituality in action. Kierkegaard’s subjective thinker is not only letting go of control, but as Jesus before him, he is trusting God. Jesus and Kierkegaard provide models of authentic spirituality because subjective truth risks everything for God. As Anthony Imbrosciano puts it in his article on Kierkegaard, the individual that exists in subjective truth moves out of a purity of heart to help the other for the good of the other.7 The true revolutionary is not one that acts for personal gain, but one that unselfishly puts the good of others ahead of self. Imbrosciano claims that this gives Kierkegaard’s work a socio-political orientation. Jesus is a revolutionary. He comes to all in the name of love, forgiveness, and justice. Jesus

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was a revolutionary of outstanding integrity of character because of purity of heart. He gave his life that others might live. Kierkegaard teaches us that spirituality and altruistic social action go hand in hand. The leap into subjective truth is not without anxiety. In putting the other ahead of self, the individual risks everything. But because the action imitates Christ, as he gave his life for us, we gain eternal life. Kierkegaard finds the answer to being a Christian in Abraham’s commitment to slay Isaac. Kierkegaard does not find spirituality in what he understands about God (killing.) He secures the metaphysical ground of spirituality in faithfully doing God’s will. Jesus is man, but he is also God. As a man, Jesus is like us in every way except sin. Jesus as God is a Blessed Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as detailed in the Trinitarian arms of the person-making process. Christ’s dual nature explains how the likeness of God moves us towards the divine image. The human intellect guides the moral life, but the human will animates the desire to serve God. We learn about spirituality from Jesus the man, as he shows us how the connection between likeness and image works. Jesus, as social action teacher, points to the wisdom inscribed in the human heart, on what to do to be spiritual in all the associations that characterize us. Christians follow his life and teachings as model of an ideal, pure of heart, pilgrimage towards the gift of the divine image in us. Jesus as man provides a perfect model (unselfish) of spirituality in action. This explains spirituality as loving tendency towards God. We come from God, and return to God at death. But who is God? We need to distinguish between the natures of God as such and our knowledge of God lest the elusiveness of the natures of God lulls us into accepting wrongful characterizations of Him. We find the most clearly articulated study of this problem in William Gerber’s The Deepest Questions You Can Ask about God,8 and Rem B. Edwards’s, Who Caused the Big Bang?9 Gerber explains how the God of Abraham’s religion is omniscient, omnipotent, ubiquitous, necessary, eternal, absolute, and so on. What does this mean to a rational being? It means nothing at all because the concept exists beyond reason. It puts God at a place beyond the limits of human understanding. Kierkegaard separated reason and faith on that account. While Aquinas holds that faith and reason are complementary, the Thomistic separation of (finite) essence from existence does not lead to a univocal grasp of God as pure existence (I Am who Am) but to analogical concepts that can be examined better by poets and musicians than by theologians and philosophers. Artistic and literary expressions are at home when they move beyond the limitations of reason. The artist can go where the philosopher’s dependence on language cannot venture. Edwards takes us to the limits of the language possibility. The big bang of science would not have happened without the Creator God. Still, the appli-


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cation of the principle of sufficient reason to the creative act stretches that principle to the breaking point as we leap from the visible order (the what and the when of existence) to the invisible (the why and the how) of creation. Looking for God in a time before time was time or searching in places in space before space existed implies a sort of madness. Edwards will have nothing of it. The distinction between the order of time and the order of being is critical to the argument. Jacques Maritain makes this point in Approaches to God; the visible world can exist eternally, but the existence of being (of something rather than nothing) demands justification. Aquinas fixed that origin in God’s creative act. He draws on the causes of being, the principle of sufficient reason, and the impossibility of infinite regress (in the order of being) to arrive at the existence of God as efficient cause or unmoved mover of the world.10 God’s creative act explains why something exists rather than nothing. Finding being’s ultimate condition in God grounds its explanation, given that each explanation does not lead to a regress in which each condition depends upon another and continues unfounded in an infinite series of subordinated causes. Are we begging the question, is this belief an unbridled non sequitur? The success of the argument depends on the discovery of the eternal in the temporal (and avoiding the absurdity of seeking to move outside the temporal.) The belief in the existence of God provides a connection between the visible and the invisible world because it expresses the ground of standing in the presence of being. It safeguards the possibility of doing metaphysics, a possibility that Aquinas and Maritain disclose. We need not go beyond the temporal to discover the presence of the eternal. The root of the possibility of questioning the temporal is itself a given possibility that moves us beyond temporality. We know the world exists but the existence of the world is indemonstrable. We stand in the presence of an indubitable truth: the eternal explains the possibility of the temporal. In Christian philosophy, the events of this world provide an insight into the precious nature of existence. Logic discloses the presence of God as the sufficient reason of temporal existence, while the ways of the heart provide the spiritual fuel to enter into personal relationship with the divine ground of being. But if God loves us, how is the suffering of innocent victims explained? Does it not become difficult to reconcile the loss of life caused by floods and earthquakes, the martyr of six million Jews at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, the terrible pain and devastation inflicted upon millions of innocent people by hurricane Katrina . . . with the existence of a loving and all powerful God? How can we trust God to maintain us in eternal life? Carl Gustav Jung’s reading of the biblical book of Job suggests that God has a “dark side.” If Jung’s analysis is correct, we wonder if we can still “trust God.” Could God be unaware of that aspect of God’s personality? Jung’s book Answer to Job suggests that God accepts Satan’s wager to test Job’s

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loyalty by making him suffer.11 But God seems surprised that Job should complain about this suffering, suggesting that God might be unaware of His dark side. Job seems to know something about God that God does not know about Himself. Jung interprets the redemption as an attempt by God to redeem Himself and humankind. Jung’s view is more comfortable in Taoist (yin/yang) beliefs than in a Christian environment where suffering plays a role in personal redemption. I believe that what Job saw when God spoke to him is not God’s dark side. He saw that God also suffers. The Christian God shares in our sorrows and joys. This is the meaning of entering into personal relationship with God. Scriptures leave no doubt that Jesus experienced personal suffering. Yet, the blessed see God face to face because of the redemptive nature of divine suffering. It absolves transgressions emanating from the dark side of human nature. Jung recognizes the process of individuation as one in which the contents of the unconscious (and dark side of personality) gradually emerges out of the darkness and becomes conscious. The process of full individuation suggests that the dark side is not in control of my life. The death of Jesus assures the forgiveness of sins. Human death is an occasion for the dark side of psyche to rise to full awareness. This suggests that suffering is an opportunity for God to enter into our life and raises us into full individuation. The function of Jungian individuation is to create a process to lessen the hold of unconscious elements on conscious life. The application to personal suffering, especially as concerns the undeserved suffering of innocent victims, is to view suffering as an opportunity for personal growth. Does the evidence of history support this claim? How, for instance can we reconcile the dark side of the Old testament God with the loving God of the New Testament? The God of the Old Testament, the God Job put in the docket, presents as a mean spirited, vengeful, dimwitted angry God. This God sends plagues, floods the earth, and nukes Sodom and Gomorrah. If the story ended here, most texts in Theodicy would include a chapter on divine anger management to explain how life has survived into the twenty first century. This view gives fresh meaning to the God is dead movement. Most would avoid entering into personal relationship with a deity in therapy. Robert Buckman says that this is exactly the case: My only cavil with belief in a God—as I have said so many times during this book—is that it is so closely associated with destructive acts of slaughter. If it were not, then I would not be concerned with this whole topic, and I certainly would not have bothered writing this book in the first place.12


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In what sense are Old testaments words like destruction, slaughter, vengeance, revenge, and retribution attributed to God? How can God be a redeemer and angry at the same time? The literature suggests that these words are expressions of the attitudes, values, and beliefs of people rather than characterization of God. The root of these words—the Hebrew noun neqama (culture) suggests that the interpretation of divine behavior is a reflection of cultural values rather than an insight into the nature of God. Alan Richardson’s A Theological Word Book of the Bible provides additional insight into the role of “vengeance” in the Bible. According to Richardson, the biblical characterization of God expresses vengefulness in the light of God’s mercy. The mystery of divine mercy and vengeance moves beyond the scope of this book, but it seems possible to suggest that divine vengeance is a necessary aspect of the history of redemption. The Israelites invoke God’s vengeance as a way of dealing with enemies. The curse they put on enemies is equivalent to God doing so. The Bible becomes a guide to “the everyday business of living, of social relationships, and of current historical events.”13 Richardson interprets the text where God says to Moses “I am that I am” not in the metaphysical sense of absolute existence (a being without limiting principle,) “but in the sense of he that is present, and thus ready to manifest himself as helper.”14 This interpretation reveals that God is actively present in history. For instance, in the book of Numbers15 the Israelites’ wreaking revenge on the Midianites is equivalent to God doing so or projected onto God. We achieve a deepening of understanding of God at every stage of human history. While in our day some fundamentalists meet threatening circumstances by invoking God’s curse, waging “holy wars,” and suicide missions, most do not: “There is a deepening of the various understandings of God at different stages of Hebrew history.”16 Although the Old Testament Bible speaks of God as sometimes meting out punishment, as appears necessary if God is just, many passages speak even more eloquently of God’s gentleness, mercy, patience, and desire to forgive. God’s desire to forgive and show mercy is greater than His intention to punish the wicked. The Lord appears to Moses and introduces His justice: I, the Lord, am a God who is full of compassion and pity, who is not easily angered and who shows great love and faithfulness. I keep my promise for thousands of generations and forgive evil and sin; but I will not fail to punish children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for the sins of their parents.17 To the ancient rabbis, God says that He will punish evildoers to “the third and fourth generation” but that he will show steadfast love, mercy, and forgiveness for “thousands of generations.” Although God punishes evildoers (and he must, somehow, if He is truly just and upright), in some mysterious way, His

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mercy and kindness are far superior. At the end of the day, the God of love and forgiveness trumps the God of vengeance. The God of the New Testament is not in recovery from the God of the Old Testament after all. God’s punishment afflicts only those who persist in their sins and refuse to change their behavior; anyone who turns away from their sins will find mercy and salvation. On the other hand, John Hick explains the suffering of innocent victims as a requirement for character building. He raises a difficult theological problem: “Can the presence of evil in the world be reconciled with the existence of a God who is unlimited both in goodness and in power?”18 If God were infinitely good, He would want to prevent the suffering of innocent victims. Equally logical would be to say that if God were all-powerful, He could prevent the suffering of innocent victims. That suffering exists suggests that either God is not all loving or that He is not all-powerful. Hick’s insightful analysis of this complex problem concludes that the existence of suffering is necessary for the development of moral habits. He connects the existence of evil in the world, not with the will of God, but with a “soul-making” process, on one hand and our dark side on the other. The suffering of innocent victims is often due to negative human emotion. God did not make the bomb, round up Jews in German concentration camps or create hurricane Katrina. Uncontrolled human development produced greenhouse gases, the scientific community built the atomic bomb, and political systems both authored the German concentration camps and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. God cannot interfere without destroying our free will. Sam Harris’s argument in The End of Faith uses our fundamental inability to penetrate the mystery of God as an argument for the non-existence of God. The Christian view of Jesus, he says, is out of reach; “According to the dogma of Christianity, becoming just like Jesus is impossible. We can only enumerate one’s sins, believe in the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.” The teachings of Jesus, he adds, “cease to be a set of empirical claims about the linkage between ethics and spiritual insight and instead become a gratuitous, and rather gruesome, fairy tale.”19 But Harris overlooks that the teachings of Jesus are rooted in the language of the heart. Jesus invites us to guide ethical life by the light of an a priori moral code. That insight animates the propositions of ethics. Christians identify with the divinity of Jesus, and therefore God, because Jesus’ humanity touches our life. We see he is like us in every way, as we see him struggle with good and evil, though he does not sin. Christians identify with Jesus as he teaches about loving neighbor, being compassionate, forgiving those who trespass against us. We understand Jesus and know what to do, though we do not always follow the law of the heart. No mystery exists here because this God is within reach of human reason. Still, the road to God continues to be riddled with hard choices. Jesus does not suggest that the God of love is a “quick fix” for problems. A second


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way the Christian message is misunderstood is to use God as an escape from the problems of life. God can become a “drug of choice.” Leo Booth’s book tells the story of how he used religion to fix dysfunctional relationships in his home life. He used the drama of church ritual and liturgy to obtain a false sense of relief from negative emotions of childhood; “to escape loneliness, low self-esteem, and fear of reality.”20 His behavior is characteristic of the ways in which addicts develop coping skills to deal with negative emotion. These coping skills provide glaring instances of negative spiritual connectors to transform the use of substances or behavioral choices into an obsessive, compulsive lifestyle. The use of God as a means to power and self-worth is no different from the use of addictive substances or behaviors to fix the negative feelings we have about ourselves. The suffering of Jesus does not take place without sufficient reason. Booth says that his recovery began as he learned to make fresh spiritual connections with God: I learned that spirituality means developing a relationship with the Godwithin. I saw how I had never truly had a relationship with God; what I thought was a relationship with God was really a relationship with the dogma and rituals of religiosity. I had used those things to keep God at a distance.21 The message of Jesus is to turn things over to God. The instructions on how to do this are contained in the human heart. This is not beyond the range of logic, nor is it advanced as an escape from the struggles of life. Jesus did not seek to find escape from problems. His prayer to the Father is to ensure that the path taken is in harmony with the will of God. Jesus exemplifies the life of love, compassion, forgiveness, and charity in action. We have a clear sense of God’s plan for us because Jesus drew upon his familiar world— sheep, tax collectors, the blind, lepers, the prodigal son—to illustrate how the divine image works in the human heart and will. The challenge facing religion today is to make spiritual connections with issues of importance in the twenty-first century. Current issues include same sex marriage, divorce, the ordination of women, common law relationships, abortion, euthanasia, aid in dying, and a cluster of moral and ethical dilemmas arising out of developments in science and technology such as stem cell research, cloning, genetic screening, and engineering. Church has to reinvent Church to remain relevant to the teachings of Jesus, and help the faith community to enlist the sort of spiritual connections that promote personal healing. The Jesus of Nazareth uses parables to explain the connection between the temporal and the eternal. We do not have a connection to the eternal God other than through our world of temporal experiences. The human mind hungers for identities in time. The work of Emile Meyerson (1859–1933) illus-

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trates decisively that the history of scientific inductions—from the earliest beginnings of science to its latest developments—depends on the discovery of identities in time. Meyerson applies the same psychological principles he found in scientific inductions to the world of common sense.22 We can use those same psychological principles as a guide to the moral life. In our world, morality is relative to culture. The fleetingness of cultural relativity plunges us into ethical chaos. Yet the human heart expresses the laws of morality. The trans-cultural character of the human heart secures the possibility of ethics. This is our ethical principle of identity. The explanation is that we are hardwired to act towards something greater than ourselves. We are designed to do good and avoid evil, though the particulars on when and how the good is done varies across cultures. The Jesus story anchors the possibility of moving towards the divine image by acting in harmony with the divine likeness in the human heart. The ways of reason shed light on moral choices. Jesus thereby establishes a connection between spiritual insight and ethics. I need to be at peace to allow the language of the heart to enter into the stream of consciousness, but Jesus shows Christians why the journey to peace begins with doing the Father’s will. The death of Jesus serves as a model of absolute spirituality: “letting go,” trusting God, and forgiving others. His death is mystery and problem. As problem, it points to a letting go of human existence. Jesus teaches us how acting in the likeness of God serves as a necessary condition to acting in the image of God. He teaches us that suffering can have a redemptive feature. His death as mystery, on the other hand, is that the likeness of God in him carries the divine image in Him. Jesus the God is Creator of the world and all things contained in it. He expresses the root of the possibility of salvation. How can God “let go”? In his death, Jesus trusts the Father to secure the ultimate root of the possibility of existence. He does so because Jesus as man is divine likeness and image. The death of Jesus carries not only the human likeness in its wake but also the divine image. The risen Jesus glorifies the divine decision to “let go.” The resurrection proclaims the triumph of love over the darkness of death. What makes the language of Christian metaphysics privileged? Why should we believe the Jesus story rather than some other story or no story at all? The Jesus story with its attendant belief in redemption and life after death provides an excellent instance of spirituality in action. The sufficient reason of that belief depends on the discovery of the eternal in the temporal. The religions of India and China tell similar stories of spirituality in action, though dressed in the garb of other cultural cloth. Only the need to tell moral stories of the heart are the same, all else adds to the rich tapestry of cultural diversity.

Nineteen SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION The primary function of religion is to fill our spiritual need for connection with the sacred. While spirituality animates the tendency towards God, religion is an institutional response to our need for God. The distinction between structure and processes illustrates how the connection between spirituality as structure and religion as process takes place. Spirituality as structure is unknowable in itself. We know the spiritual as tendency or after a connection with the data of person-making has taken place. We look back on the event to observe that it has generated positive or negative emotion. The moment of connection temporarily appeases our existential restlessness towards meaning. The final resting place of spirituality lies in the attainment of ultimate meaning (the sacred.) The sacred is a universal element of human culture. Religion, on the other hand, is an organized communal response to our existential thirst for the sacred. Spirituality and religion form a dynamic unit. God makes us in His image and likeness. We yearn to reconnect with our roots in God. We are in generic grief towards God. Religion fills our need for reconnection with the divine image. Spirituality is the subjective correlate of religious dialogue. Religion is the objective correlate of that dialogue. Religion is the institutional aspect of spirituality. Spirituality is the individuated aspect of religion. The experience of the Sacred (God or Power greater than the self) arises out of this dialogue. We do not encounter the divine in the spiritual, or in religion as such, but in the union of the two in a spiritual experience of the religious from the subjective point of view, or religious experience of the spiritual objectively speaking. Religion as an institution is objective from the point of view that the communicants or faith community accepts a set of doctrines. The communicants gather regularly for worship as they express a common understanding of what they take to be the ultimate meaning of life. Being religious, on the other hand, refers to how the individual relates to that objective truth. This dimension of religion is subjective, as the work of Søren Kierkegaard makes known. At the same time, the spiritual tendency is passive from the point of view of religious doctrine, but active from the point of view that the religious experience directs the spiritual tendency to spring into subjective relationship with God. Spirituality is a necessary condition of religion. Religion is not a sufficient condition of spirituality. The divine image does not fuel all forms of religious expression. We articulate the terms of the covenant in sacred spiritual language. The Muslim community expresses great deontological reverence for the prophet Muhammad. His holy name is to be revered. The Jews

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express reverence for the law or commandments God gives Moses on Mount Sinai. Christians express reverence for the great commandment Jesus gives the Pharisees: “You shall love the Lord your God (and) You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”1 These two commandments summarize Christian religious law, while the text of Genesis 1:26 provides the metaphysical foundation: we are made in the likeness of God so that we can love God and other persons the way God (Jesus) loves us. Religion as instrument of reconnection allows the faith community to bridge the divide between the likeness of God and the divine image through love. In this life, we progress towards that goal, though the full realization of the spiritual tendency is to see God face to face. The person-making process reveals that connection with the divine can take place outside organized religion on one or more of the arms of the person-making process, though in such instances the encounter is with a power greater than self rather than with the God of Abraham. The healing techniques of new age medicine (or complementary medicine such as reike, acupuncture, aromatherapy, or herbal medicine) provide alternative pathways to healing. In our age of secular values, we sometimes view these healing techniques as substitutes for the religious connection. The success of secular approaches to the sacred depends on how well they fulfill the cravings of the spiritual tendency. The decisive test for any objective correlate of the healing continuum is does it meet the needs of the spiritual tendency or move the subject towards the divine image. The major world religions provide authentic healing because they meet spiritual needs. On the other hand, false prophets and fringe religious beliefs can put spirituality on a bad diet. Alternative healing techniques put spirituality on a reductive diet if they substitute for the religious connection. The framework for the development of rituals and symbols of religious devotion provides from culture. The distinction between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament makes this abundantly evident in the Abraham religions. The Judaic, Christian, and Islamic religions invite the faithful to enter into personal relationship with God. But the vengeful God of the Old Testament stands in sharp contrast to the loving God of the New Testament. The story of Job leads us to wonder why God allows the suffering of innocent victims, though we can read the story as an opportunity for God to dialogue with Job through human suffering. The story of human suffering plays out again in the story of the flood, and in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The New Testament puts the history of human suffering in fresh light as we see God incarnate suffer with us. The Jews do not think that Christ is the Son of God. This view proves to be divisive. Some Jews are fixated on the image of a vengeful God while others question God’s existence. Some Jews believe in eternal life, others do not. The followers of Christian and Islamic faiths splinter into equally divergent interpretations of the love God or Allah has for the faithful. These views range from a belief in the legitimacy of holy wars, and suicide missions to a


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literal interpretation of scriptures which—in the case of the Jehovah’s witnesses—leads to court challenges that redirect the way medicine goes about the business of sustaining life. While these views differ, they stand as equally valuable ways the spiritual tendency moves us towards the divine image. Many cultural responses to the call of the spiritual exist. Early Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle, shared the view that many gods exist. This explains how one God loves while the other is ill tempered, though Aristotle does not think that the Gods enter into personal relationship with us. Upon human death, Aristotle says, the soul returns to the potentiality of matter. The Gods are fulfilled and do not care about mortals. William James (1842–1910), on the other hand, believes in a multiplicity of saving powers because this option presents a metaphysical (pragmatic) solution to the God debate. The belief in the existence of a plurality of saving powers is more promising than monotheism. Not all religious claims have practical consequences as their basis. Jehovah’s Witnesses exercise their belief about the impurities of blood products, including allograph transfusion, irrespective of consequences to the faithful. The deontological claim suggests that some ethical beliefs are worthy of our dying for them. The refusal of blood products puts life at-risk, though life might not be otherwise worth living. This action is spiritual, though to the contemporary non-Jehovah ear it sounds like medical nonsense. The apparently contradictory views of the spiritual tendency suggest that God reveals Himself to us in a way that reflects our limited cultural understanding of Him. The apparently different behavioral responses of God to His people in the Old and New Testaments is no less glaring than the conflicting ethical statements practiced in current times. Cultural lenses filter the interpretation of God’s will. The concepts of honor and shame shape the norms of ancient Israelite society, as they sought to maintain honor in the Ancient world. The Israelites would not tolerate insult by another person or group without seeking punishment or retribution to regain their honor. This practice continues in some Middle Eastern countries where “honor killings” still take place in response to offences committed against families. Similarly, if God is truly the greatest of all kings, He must be able to regain His honor by punishing those who had disobeyed Him or mocked His rule. The Israelites see this as a question of restoring balance. We find this view of balance and the good life in Aristotle’s doctrine of the virtues. The culture of the New Testament, on the other hand, presents a fresh way to deal with shame and insult as Jesus teaches us to “turn the other cheek” rather than exact vengeance. We need to forgive enemies, says the Lord. The spirituality of non-violence is an attempt to reclaim the culture of peace and love practiced by Christ. His divine compassion does not call out the “guns of war” to remedy injustice because “those who attack with the sword will perish by the sword.” Non-violence is not the aim of truly spiritual justice.

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The solution to the culture of violence begins within self. We need to examine the associations that make us truly personal to determine how we put our own spiritual tendency on a bad diet. Can we end violence if we return self-centeredness and selfishness with hatred and violence? Can we be compassionate if we do nothing? Non-violence is not the opposite of violence. We need to do something. We need to practice kindness lessons: In a culture of non-violence justice would mean reformation by recognizing that those who do wrong do it out of ignorance or attenuating circumstances. Punishing the person instead of resolving the problem only aggravates physical violence in the form of crime and violence.2 The attempt to put an end to human violence is not an easy task, as the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence makes known. The twentieth century is the bloodiest in human history. In that period there were 250 wars and over ten million people were killed, many of them innocent victims. The political tragedy of war leaves devastation, chaos, fear, and anger in the hearts of people. The desire for revenge is real as families torn apart by the ravages of war struggle for the necessities of life. Domestic violence compounds the problem of eroding family values. It results in physical, sexual or psychological harm to women and children. Estimates suggest that around the world, one in every three women has been beaten, forced into sex, or otherwise abused. Studies suggest that men who act out against women and children are often themselves the victims of childhood abuse. Violence begets violence. The simplistic reduction of events to the will of God could mislead one into blaming God for this state of affairs. On the contrary, Christians believe that Christ came to earth to put an end to exploitation and violence. His death and resurrection offers promise of a new world. It casts a light on the fog of cultural relativism, though barely visible at times of war, the resurrection of Christ offers promise that love and kindness will prevail over darkness. 1. Eschatology We can now bring death and religion together in a final synthesis to suggest how the attainment of the divine image works. While spirituality is the loving tendency towards God, religion is the light that guides the development of reason towards the divine image. The essential function of religion is to provide a map or eschatology for the realization of the end God intends for everyone. Spirituality is the radar, religion the path to the Sacred. Eastern and Western religions take a different route towards the Absolute though all religions cluster about the centrality and dignity of the person. In the West, the person-making process serves to fill the cup of personhood as the streams of associations light up spirituality (the divine image in us.) In the East, the


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associations that make up persons empty as the state of the non-ego approaches. The movement of communion with a power greater than self revolves around the same person-making process in Eastern and Western religions. The one moves inwardly on the arms of person-making to rejoin a personal absolute, while the other moves outwardly from the centrality of personhood to the relationships or processes of life (the All.) Buddhism expresses the belief that clinging to the self is the main source of suffering in this world. The solution to the problem of suffering exists in the successful movement out of self-centeredness towards the All of existence. The guide is provided in following the four Noble truths and the Noble Eightfold path practiced by the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama). The realization that the existence of a separate self is an illusion promotes enlightenment. The doctrine of rebirth suggests that many life cycles are required to achieve this final state of enlightenment. The Buddha achieved it in one lifetime. Most others are born somewhere along that trajectory, some individuals enter the present round of life further along the path than others. Siddhartha came into the world walking and talking. He had compassion for everything. To express compassion for others is to know others to be an extension of self. No dualism exists between self, others, and the environment. The illusion of a separate self causes suffering. The movement away from self through the environmental and social arms of temporal existence ultimately achieves enlightenment through communion with the All of existence. The individual now emptied of the illusion of being separate from things is free from suffering. Division causes suffering. The state is enlightened because no division exists. The Abraham religions, on the other hand, encourage the faithful to enter into personal dialogue with God, as the dynamics of Genesis 1:26 details. The holy play takes place on the stage of becoming more truly personal. The associations that cluster on these arms individuate us as corporeal, finite beings. The essential thing about being human from the point of view of maintaining personal identity in the afterlife state without the body is this individuation. The laws and patterns of temporal existence temper the disembodied self. The environmental-self develops out of a definite uterus, with an identifiable DNA pattern, while cellular addition and division (meiosis and mitosis) takes place in accordance with physical laws to make me who I am. The social-self develops out of the nurturing relationships of parents and other persons. What counts at human death from the point of view of personal identity is that these individuating characteristics accompany me into the afterlife. The faces of being a person include the social and central arms and the environmental arm of becoming more personal. The social-self individuates me. I am the product of loving relationships taking place in my social-self. These formative associations include a uniquely personal or individuating family love, from these parents, that brother and sister, this aunt and uncle, these grandparents, these friends, and those pets, if any. This association

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molds my spirit into its essence. The process is passive and active as I depend on them to be what I am, but go on to develop some of these associations as reason sets in and I mature as a person. The process is ongoing since it moves us towards the divine image—a vision attained fully in the next life. The process of instituting and varying relationships, consciously and unconsciously, takes place on the arm of the central-self. The “I” reading this text is the output of all these associations. This is who you are. At death, the soul disengages from the arms of the person-making process but does so as an individuated, social, environmental, central-self, replete with moral habits and the stamp of finitude. At human death, I carry this into the afterlife with me. I can no more exist in the afterlife state without these individuating characteristics than in this life. This view of the disembodied soul brings to full maturity Gabriel Marcel’s view of the other as an extension of the self. I can no more function in separation from others than consciousness can operate in the absence of its object. The love that exists between us generates my sense of who I am. That love is essential to maintaining my personal identity. Death is not the separation of lovers or the end of a love life. On the contrary, death raises the loving relationship to a new level in the afterlife. Death is not the end of character building because the soul carries moral habits in the afterlife. Death is not the end of my being as corporeal because the environmental-self molds me into what I am. The resurrection of the body happens at the moment of death, not at some point in the future. St. Paul has not been waiting two thousand years to regain a physical, social and central-self because these aspects of his person make him St. Paul. To the West, the supposition that St. Paul roams the heavens as disembodied spirit, or incomplete person is problematic, as the critique of dualism makes known. To the East, the belief that St. Paul exists in the afterlife state as an individuated entity is equally problematic. 2. East Meets West: The Centrality of the Person-making Process Can Eastern and Western religions meet to celebrate their differences? Nothing surpasses the eloquence and vision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in that regard: All religions make the betterment of humanity their main concern. When we view different religions as instruments for developing such human qualities as compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, and self-discipline, we can appreciate what they have in common . . . . By declaring my respect and reverence for all the world’s major faiths, I am not advocating any attempt to unify the various traditions into a single “world religion.” I firmly believe that we need different religions, because a single tradition


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cannot satisfy the needs and mental dispositions of the great diversity that is our human community. Even our body needs a variety of food.3 The person-making process serves as focal point for the unification of Eastern and Western religions. It can do this without losing sight of the differences that make the World religions special. Travel in an outwardly direction on the arms of the person-making process to arrive at being’s intelligibility or the All of existence as the generic root of the possibility of existence. Our seeing ourselves as standing outside that root serves as religious incentive to move beyond the self. Travel inwardly on the arms of the person-making process to arrive at a personal Absolute. The spiritual desire to attain the divine image that is promised in the text of Genesis 1:26 animates the journey. The phenomenon of human death presents as a return to the Sacred, whether as personal Absolute or as the All of existence, made possible by a reversal in the primacy of being. At human death, the root of the possibility of a person-making process ceases for the temporal life of self but emerges to complete intelligibility in the eternal life of self. For as long as we live, we depend on the environmental arm of being (in the West) for personal communion with God, or (In the East) for reconnection with the All of Being. For as long as we are alive being reveals itself to us through the veil of space and time. In this world, being’s intelligibility is piecemeal as being continues to send us on errands to discover truth. But at death, being’s temporal (limited) self-disclosure ceases, and being’s eternal (full) disclosure begins. The desk at which I sit constitutes one of the environmental arms of being a person. To say that the desk is an intelligible artifact is to affirm that at some point in history the possibility of building a desk presented itself. This means that the ‘tree’ presents itself as a possibility that the mind fashions into a desk. For as long as I live, the ‘tree’ and I are in conversation. At some point, consciousness of the ‘tree’ fades. This is dying. Death is the ‘tree’s refusal to be for consciousness. Human death is the removal of the possibility of consciousness rather than the recalcitrance of consciousness from being. Death is not something we do. Rather, death is the refusal of being to be for consciousness. Human death is a reversal in the ultimate root of the possibility of doing and not doing. At death, being reclaims the ground of intelligibility. The reclaim of ground is not the annihilation of the environmental arm. If death is not the end of personal existence, we need to look at being for an explanation of the afterlife state. We look to being’s intelligibility because we can only imagine death from the point of view of human experience. In that event, it must be the case that being’s intelligibility continues in duration above time. At human death, the silence in being’s temporal intelligibility must be followed by a simultaneous emergence of intelligibility in duration outside space and time. I have examined this view in Persons and Immortality through a discussion of death as the moment of final decision. The reversal in

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being and the emergence of being’s intelligibility to absolute disclosure sorts out what must happen if the obstinacy of the dead is to be explained. This metaphysical view of death satisfies the Abraham religions as it brings us face to face with a personal loving Absolute. It equally meets the rigors of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism because it explains how to realize the journey towards the All of existence by moving out of the temporal and spatial self. Above all, it explains what needed to be unpacked most of all, namely, how the spiritual character of a person-making process moves everyone towards their intended end. Spirituality is ultimately reducible to the Sacred as to God, Higher Power, Allah, or the Tao. The Christian reward for fidelity to the Sacred is expressed in 2 Timothy: 6–8: The time of my dissolution is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on a merited crown awaits me; on that day the Lord, just judge that he is, will award it to me—and not only to me, but to all who have looked for his appearing with eager longing.4

NOTES Introduction 1.

Neil Postman, Technopoly (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 103.

Chapter One 1. Ian S. Markham, ed., World Religions Reader (New York: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 372–373. 2. Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 365. 3. Ibid., pp. 370, 372, 376. 4. David H. Turner, Genesis Regained: Aboriginal Forms of Renunciation in Judeo-Christian Scriptures and Other Major Traditions (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 1–59. 5. Quoted in Donald A. Crosby, The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 357. 6. Ibid., p. 374. 7. H. J. McCloskey, “God and Evil,” God and Evil: Readings on the Theological Problem of Evil, ed. Nelson Pike (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 84. 8. John Leslie Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” God and Evil, p. 60. 9. Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 95. 10. Smith, The World’s Religions, p. 72. 11. Walter Terence Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics (New York: The New American Library, 1960), p. 37. 12. Ibid., p. 64. 13. Ibid., p. 93.

Chapter Two 1. Tom Harpur, The Uncommon Touch: An Investigation of Spiritual Healing (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994). 2. Matt. 9:35–38 (Bible references in this chapter are from The New English Bible with the Apocrypha). 3. Matt. 10:37–38. 4. Matt. 10:34–36. 5. Matt. 11:28–30. 6. Matt. 10:1. 7. Matt. 11:2–6.

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8. Elaine Pagels, “The Politics of Paradise,” The New York Review of Books (12 May 1988), pp. 28–37; and Erik Reece, “Jesus without the Miracles: Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and the Gospel of Thomas,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2005), pp. 33–41. 9. Matt. 7:15–16. 10. Harpur, The Uncommon Touch, pp. 36–45, 136–138; and Susan Wager, A Doctor’s Guide to Therapeutic Touch (New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 1996), pp. 1–9, 62–83. 11. Dora Kunz, “Introduction,” Wager, A Doctor’s Guide to Therapeutic Touch, p. viii. 12. Lionel Trilling, “Art and Neurosis,” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: The Viking Press, 1953), p. 173. 13. William Barrett, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); and Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1958). 14. John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1995). 15. Ibid., p. 34. 16. Paul Johnson, The Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988). 17. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 16. 18. Hans Georg Artur Viktor Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 49–77. 19. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Roderick Milton Chisholm (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 65. 20. Fedor Sologub, Plamennyy Krug: Stikhi (Moscow: Zolotoe Runo, 1908), bk. 8, p. 177. (Ponomoreff’s trans.) 21. Alexander Blok, Sobranie Sochineniy, 8 vol. (Moscow-Leningrad: GIKHLI, 1960–1963), vol. 6, p. 22, vol. 5, p. 430, respectively. 22. Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 262, 292, respectively. 23. Feodor Dostoevsky, “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” The Brothers Karamazov (Melbourne: W. Heinemann, 1912); and Evgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, We (New York: Viking Press, 1972). 24. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 151.

Chapter Three 1. The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1990). 2. See, for example, Der Heilige Qur-ân: Arabisch und Deutsch, ed. Bashiruddin Mahmud Ahmad (Zurich: Islam Publishers, 1959), pp. 38–58, esp. 37–38, 50, 55. 3. Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1955), pp. 38–39; and Alfred Guillaume, Islam (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 64.

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4. Koran, p. 414. 5. Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 72, 239, 237 respectively. 6. The Koran, p. 290. 7. Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. 124. 8. Guillaume, Islam, pp. 55–56. 9. Ibid., pp. 73–74.

Chapter Four 1. George P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind: Kievan Christianity, The Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946), p. 38. 2. Mikhail Vladimirovich Alpatov, Early Russian Icon Painting (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1974). 3. Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev, A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958); quote from Marc Raeff, ed., Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 6. 4. Isaiah Berlin, “The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia,” Russian Thinkers, eds. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 117. 5. Nikolay Gogol, “The Overcoat,” A Treasury of Great Russian Short Stories, Pushkin to Gorky, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Macmillan, 1944). 6. Ivan Trugenev, “Notes of a Hunter,” A Treasury of Great Russian Short Stories, Pushkin to Gorky. 7. Feodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot: A Novel in Four Parts, trans. Constance Black Garnett (New York: Heritage Press, 1956). 8. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, trans. R. M. French (London: Centenary Press, 1947), p. 25. 9. Alexander Aleksandrovich Blok, Verses on a Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o Prekrasnoy Dame, 1901–1902), in Sobranie sochineniy, vol.1 (Moscow-Leningrad:

GIKHLI, 1960 ). 10. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 130. 11. Crane Brinton, The Shaping of the Modern Mind (New York: The New American Library, 1953), p. 103. 12. Constantin V. Ponomareff, On the Dark Side of Russian Literature, 1709–1910 (New York: Peter Lang,1987), esp. pp. 11–21. 13. Quoted in Derek A. Traversi, “Dostoevsky,” Dostoevsky: Collection of Critical Essays, ed. René Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 163. 14. Feodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground,” The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, ed. Eudora Welty (New York: Random House, 1978). 15. Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky I Nietzsche (Filosofiya Tragedii) (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasyulevich, 1903), pp. 55–56.

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16. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 45.

Chapter Five 1. V. V. Berezovsky, “Mussorgsky,” Russkaya Muzyka (St. Petersburg: Yu. N. Erlikh Press, 1898), p. 265. 2. Kurt Honolka, “Die Musik Russlands,” Die Grossen der Kunst Literatur und Musik. Russland, ed. Hermann Missenharter (Stuttgart, Germany: Union Verlag, 1964), p. 369; and Richard Taruskin, Mussorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 374, 384, 385, 389, 390. 3. See Michael D. Calvocoressi, Modest Mussorgsky: His Life and Works (London: J. M. Dent, 1956), pp. 64, 129–130, 195, 206–209. 4. Taruskin, Mussorgsky, pp. 3–37. 5. Berezovsky, “Mussorgsky,” pp. 250, 264, 266–267; Sergej V. Utechin, Everyman’s Concise Encyclopaedia of Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961), p. 366; and Theodore Karp, Dictionary of Music (New York: Dell, 1973), p. 257. 6. Quoted in Arsenii Golenishchev-Kutuzov, “Reminiscences of Mussorgsky,” Mussorgsky Remembered, ed. Alexandra Orlova, trans. Véronique Zaytseff and Frederick Morrison (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 95. See also F. A. Brokgaus and I. A. Efron, Entsyklopedicheskii Slovar’, vol. 39 (St. Petersburg: I. A. Efron, 1890–1907), p. 228; and David Ewen, Encyclopedia of the Opera (New York: Mill and Wang, 1955), pp. 337–338. 7. Orlova, Mussorgsky Remembered, p. 208. 8. Taruskin, Mussorgsky, pp. 3–37. 9. Ibid., p. 25. 10. Ibid., p. 404. 11. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 412. 12. Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson, eds., The Mussorgsky Reader: A Life of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky in Letters and Documents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947), pp. 25, 67, 96, 166, 359, 405, (emphasis in the original). 13. Taruskin, Mussorgsky, p. 322. 14. Leyda and Bertensson, The Mussorgsky Reader, p. 90. 15. Ibid., p. 370. 16. Berezovsky, “Mussorgsky,” p. 271 (Ponomareff’s trans.). 17. Kurt Honolka, “Die Musik Russlands,” pp. 366–367. 18. Leyda and Bertensson, The Mussorgsky Reader, pp. 90, 99, 89, respectively. 19. Modest Mussorgsky, Complete Songs, Boris Christoff, bass; Alexander Labinsky, piano; with the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, conducted by Georges Tzipine (Paris, 1955–1957), CD 3, p. 108 (Ponomareff’s trans.).

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Chapter Six 1. Hans Erich Nossack, Der Untergang (The Destruction), Afterword by Walter Boehlich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), p. 36 (Ponomareff’s trans.). 2. Cecil Maurice Bowra, “T. S. Eliot, ‘The Wasteland,’” The Creative Experiment (New York: Grove Press, 1948), pp. 168, 170, 171, 173, 175–176, 183, 185. 3. Ibid., pp. 187, 163, respectively. 4. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961), pp. 124, 130, respectively. 5. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 51–74 (In the following excerpts from the poem, italics are Eliot’s; Ponomareff’s trans.). 6. Ibid., p. 70n. 7. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 122. 8. Ibid., p. 264. 9. Ibid., p. 308

Chapter Seven 1. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); and Isaiah Berlin, “Lasting Effects,” The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 118– 147. 2. Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Fischer Bücherei, 1963), p. 352; English translation, The Tin Drum, trans. Ralph Manheim (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1970), p. 417 (Hereafter, citation page numbers will refer to the German, then English version respectively). 3. Ibid., p. 40/48. 4. Ibid., p. 165/198. 5. Ibid., p. 383/455. 6. Ibid., p. 493/579. 7. Günter Grass, Der Butt (Darmstadt, Germany: Luchterhand Verlag, 1977), p. 227; English translation, The Flounder, trans. Ralph Manheim (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978), p. 179.

Chapter Eight 1. Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1946). 2. Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1957 © 1956). 3. Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 351–352. 4. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1948). 5. Albert Camus, Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 874, 87, respectively (Ponomareff’s trans.). 6. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, trans Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 210.

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7. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 91. 8. Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1942–1951, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Paragon House, 1991), pp. 7, 15, 97, 111, 112, respectively. 9. Albert Camus, L’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 178 (Ponomareff’s trans.). 10. Albert Camus, “La femme adultère,” (“The Adulteress”) (1954), L’exil et le royaume (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), pp. 32–33 (Ponomareff’s trans.). 11. Camus, Notebooks, p. 270. 12. Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 364.

Chapter Nine 1. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1989). 2. Ibid., p. 107; see also pp. 17, 341, 354. See also Tao (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000), pp. 323–342. 3. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1996). 4. Ibid., p. 278. 5. Ibid., p. 174–175. 6. Ibid., p. 217. 7. Ibid., p. 7. 8. Jeanne Achterberg, Imagery in Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine (Boston, Ma.: Shambhala Publications, 1985), pp. 131, 145, 51, 187, respectively. 9. Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), pp. 92, 134, 241, 225, 226, 233, respectively. 10. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1948); and Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Ralph Manheim (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1970). 11. Günter Grass, Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (Berlin-Frohnau, Germany: Luchterhand Verlag, 1956), p. 15 (Ponomareff’s trans.).

Chapter Ten 1. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1949), p. 191. 2. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (Harmondsworth, England: Arkana/Mentor, 1989), p. 11. 3. Albrecht Fölsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography, trans. Ewald Osers (New York: Viking, 1997), pp. 120–121; see also pp. 165, 177, 267, 306, 393, 563, 577, 708. 4. Ibid., p. 703. 5. Ibid., p. 632. 6. Quoted in Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (New York: The New American Library, 1954), p. 117. 7. Fölsing, Albert Einstein, p 572.

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8. Ibid., p. 740. 9. Ibid., pp. 343, 354–355, 366, 399, 402, 645, 723, 728, 733–734, 737, 738, and passim. 10. Ibid., p. 640. 11. Ibid., p. 703. 12. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, p. 127.

Chapter Eleven 1. The material in section one is based on Josef Paul Hodin, Edvard Munch (New York: Praeger, 1972); Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work (Chicago, Ill.: Murray, 1984); Edvard Munch, Edvard Munch, ed. Ian Dunlop (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); and Robert Rosenblum, “Munch and Hodler,” Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 2. Hodin, Edvard Munch, p. 92. 3. Ibid., pp. 183–184. 4. Heller, Munch, pp. 172–173; and Hodin, Edvard Munch, p. 72. For the original painting of Madonna (1893–1894), see Tomas M. Messer, Edvard Munch (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), p. 93. For another hand color lithograph (1895–1897), see Heller, Munch, p. 149. 5. Messer, Edvard Munch, p. 141. 6. Hodin, Edvard Munch, p. 50. 7. Heller, Munch, p. 223. 8. Ronald David Laing, The Politics of Experience, and, The Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 110. 9. Ibid., p. 36.

Chapter Twelve 1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965); and Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), esp. pp. 418–570. 2. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 144; see also p. 151. 3. See Carl Gustav Jung, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans. Richard Francis Carrington Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 41–49. 4. Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self, trans. Richard Francis Carrington Hull (New York: The New American Library, 1961), p. 48, 101, 102–103, 125, respectively. 5. Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 38, 72 (Jung’s emphasis), 73, respectively. 6. Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” Man and His Symbols (New York: A Laurel Edition by Dell, 1977), pp. 1–94, esp. 6. 7. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 102.

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8. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” pp. 41, 34, 68, respectively. 9. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 113. 10. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” pp. 84, 85, 92, respectively. 11. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p.31. 12. Jolande Jacobi, ed., Psychological Reflections: An Anthology of the Writings of Carl Gustav Jung (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), p. 315. 13. Carl Gustav Jung, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” The Basic Writings of Carl Gustav Jung, ed. Violet S. Laszlo, trans. Richard Francis Carrington Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 461. 14. Quoted in Mary Ann Mattoon, Jungian Psychology in Perspective (New York: The Free Press, 1985), p. 200 (Jung’s emphasis).

Chapter Thirteen 1. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: The New American Library, 1958), pp. 293, 295, 297, 306–307, respectively. 2. Walter Terence Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics (New York: The New American Library, 1960), p. 137. 3. Constantin V. Ponomareff, unpublished, 1995. 4. Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics, p. 20. 5. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Fontana Books, 1959), p. 223. 6. James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1996), pp. 145, 58, respectively.

Chapter Fourteen 1. Genesis 1:26 (New American Bible). 2. Robert Buckman, Can We Be Good Without God? (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2002), p. 255. 3. Pathik D. Wadhwa, “Psychoneuroendoctrine Processes in Human Pregnancy Influence Fetal Developments and Health,” Psychoneuroendoctrinology, 30 (2005), pp. 724–743. 4. William E. Carlo, The Ultimate Reducibility of Essence to Existence in Existential Metaphysics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.) 5. Ibid., p. 103. 6. Kenneth A. Bryson, Persons and Immortality (Amsterdam and New York: Edition Rodopi B.V., 1999), pp. 89–103. 7. Geri Miller, Incorporating Spirituality in Counseling and Psychotherapy (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), p. 90. 8. N. VanDeMark, L. Russell, M. O’Keefe, N. Finkelstein, C. Noether, J. Gampel, “Children of Mothers with Substance Abuse, Mental Illness, and Trauma,” Journal of Community Psychology, 33:4 (2005), pp. 445–459. 9. E. Dejin-Karlsson and P. O. Ostergren, “Psychosocial Factors, Lifestyle, and Fetal Growth,” European Journal of Public Health, 13 (2003), pp. 210–217.

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10. Buckman, Can We Be Good Without God? p. 107. 11. Kenneth A. Bryson, “Spirituality, Meaning, and Transcendence,” Palliative and Supportive Care, 2 (2004), pp. 321–328. 12. Margaret Burkhardt and Mary Gail Nagai-Jacobson, Spirituality: Living Our Connectedness (Albany, N.Y.: Thompson Learning, 2002), p. 5. 13. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, ed. Edward Bouverie Pusey, trans. James Johnson Shaw and Marcus Dods (Chicago, Ill.: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), bk. 1. chap.1, p. 1. 14. Geri Miller, Incorporating Spirituality in Counseling and Psychotherapy (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), p. 6. 15. Elizabeth J. Taylor, Spiritual Care (Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Education, 2002.) 16. Contemporary Issues in Medicine: Communications in Medicine (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Medical Colleges, 1999), pp. 25–26. 17. Kenneth A. Bryson, “Spirituality, Meaning, and Transcendence,” Pal-

liative and Supportive Care, 2 (2004), pp. 321–328. Chapter Fifteen 1. Genesis 1:26 (Bible references in this chapter are from New American Bible). 2. Michael Dauphinais, “Loving the Lord Your God: The Imago Dei in Saint Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist, 63 (1999), pp. 241–267. 3. Colossians 1:15. 4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago, Ill.: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 1. q. 93, a.9. 5. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York, N.Y.: Herder and Herder, 1970), p. 50. 6. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1. q. 32, a. 1. 7. Austin Flannery, ed., Vatican Council 11 (Northport, N.Y.: Costello Publishing, 1982), pp. 389–390. 8. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1. q. 27, a.1. 9. Ibid., 1. q.37, a.1. 10. John 10:30. 11. John 14:28. 12. Rahner, The Trinity, p. 15. 13. Ibid., p. 13. 14. Aloysius Janssens, The Mystery of the Trinity (Fresno, Calif.: Academy Library Gould, 1954), p. 72. 15. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1. q. 29, a.1, 1. q. 29, a. 3, respectively. 16. Dauphinais, “Loving the Lord Your God,” p. 248. 17. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1. q. 93, a.4. 18. Ibid., 1. q. 29, a.4, 1, q.37, a.1, respectively. 19. Rahner, The Trinity, pp. 103–109. 20. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1. q.93, a.5. 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit (trans. Stuart Gilbert), No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1949), p. 52.

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22. Jacques Maritain, Approaches to God (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 72. 23. Aloysius Janssens, The Mystery of the Trinity (Fresno, Calif.: Academy Library Gould, 1954), p. 70. 24. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1. q. 36, a.1. 25. John Daniel Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewoods Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 206, 208, respectively. 26. Lennart Nordenfelt and Liss Per-Erik, eds., Dimensions of Health and Health Promotion (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2003). 27. Janssens, The Mystery of the Trinity, p. 16. 28. David Stanley, “Go and Tell John What You Hear and See,” Who Do People Say I Am? eds. Francis Eigo and Silvio Fittipaldi (Villanova, Pa..: The Villanova University Press, 1980), p. 66. 29. Bernard P Prussac, “The Son of Man Came Eating and Drinking,” Who Do People Say I Am? p. 14. 30. 1 Corinthians 13: 1–13 31. Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroads, 1982), p. 183. 32. Bernard Prusak, “The Son of Man Came Eating and Drinking,” Who Do People Say I Am? p. 15. 33. Fritjof Capra, Belonging to the Universe, eds. Thomas Matus, and David SteindlRast (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 95. 34. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1977). 35. Kenneth A. Bryson, Persons and Immortality (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1999), pp. 7–34. 36. Albert Dondeyne, Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith, trans. Ernan Vincent McMullin and John Burnheim (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1958). 37. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam, 1988), p. 127. 38. William Lane Craig, “Scientific Confirmation of the Cosmological Argument,” Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed., ed. Louis P. Pojman (Belmont Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998), p. 40. 39. Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 203. 40. Rahner, The Trinity, pp. 34–35. 41. Matthew 22:9; Mark 12:31; Luke 6:31; and John 13: 34–35. 42. See Sartre, No Exit. 43. Marvin Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas (New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins, 1992) p. 23. 44. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1–11. q.91, a.1, 1–11. q. 91, a.2, 1–11. q. 93, a.2. 45. Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science (1967), pp. 1203–1207. 46. Genesis 1:28. 47. Peter P. Cvek, “Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law, and Environmental Ethics,” Vera Lex, 1:1 (Winter 2000), pp. 5–18.

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48. Gro Harlem Bruntland, Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 49. Martin Heidegger, The Question of Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977). 50. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1. q. 1–16. 51. 1 Corinthians 13: 1–13. Chapter Sixteen 1. Genesis 1:31 (Bible references in this chapter are from New American Bible). 2. Time Magazine, 1 August 2005. 3. Kenneth A. Bryson, Flowers and Death (North York, Ontario: University Press of Canada, 1995), pp. 102–108. 4. M. B. Sobell, and L. C. Sobell, “Individualized Behavior Therapy for Alcoholics,” Behavior Therapy, 4 (1973), pp. 49–72; “Second-Year Treatment Outcome of Alcoholics Treated by Individualized Behavior Therapy: Results,” Behavior Research and Therapy, 14 (1976), pp. 195–215; and Behavioral Treatment of Alcohol Problems (New York: Plenum, 1978). 5. M. L. Pendery, I. M. Maltzman, and L. J. West, “Controlled Drinking by Alcoholics? New Findings and a Reevaluation of a Major Affirmative Study.,” Science, 217 (1982), pp. 169–175. 6. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), pp. 175–186; and James Morrison, DSM-IV Made Easy (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995). 7. Ibid., p. 69. 8. Ibid., p. 80. 9. Graeme M. Cunningham, “Developing an Office Management Plan for the Alcoholic Patient,” The Canadian Journal of Diagnosis (February 1992), p. 77. 10. John A. Ewing, “Detecting Alcoholism: The CAGE Questionaire,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 252 (1984), pp. 1905–1907. 11. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1103b 15–26. 12. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature (New York: The Modern Library, 1936). 13. See Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press for American Scandinavian Foundation, 1941). 14. David Patton “Becoming a Living Witness: The Oxford Group Way of Life,” Quodlibet, accessed 4 March 2006. 15. Ibid. 16. John Batterson, “How to Listen to God,” < http://www.aabibliography.com/ how tolistentogod.pdf> accessed 4 March 2006. 17. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), pp. 83–84.

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18. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2003, 1981); and 44 Questions (New York: Works Publishing, 1952).

Chapter Seventeen 1. Bernard Lenarz, “The Priest and the Sober Alcoholic—Sobriety and Spiritual Progress,” The Best of the Blue Book, vol. 11, 1960–1997 (Brooklyn, New York: NCCA, 1999), p. 71. 2. Mary Mann, “Counseling the Alcoholic,” The Best of the Blue Book, p. 83. 3. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2003, 1981); and 44 Questions (New York: Works Publishing, 1952), opening lines. 4. Ibid., Step One. 5. Christiana Ashabo, “Addiction,” Priests and People, 12:2 (1998), pp. 61–65. 6. Matthew 18:20. 7. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 120. 8. Ibid., p. 121. 9. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or : A Fragment of Life (1843), trans. Walter Lowrie, David Ferdinand Swenson, and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1944). 10. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, and, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941). 11. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946). 12. Matthew 26:39. 13. Bernard Lenarz, “The Priest and the Sober Alcoholic,” p. 74. 14. Matthew 20:1–20. 15. Thomas Donovan, “Understanding the Alcoholic,” Alcoholism a Source Book for the Priest (Indianapolis, Indiana: National Clergy Conference on Alcoholism, 1960), pp. 115, 117, 118, respectively. 16. Alcoholics Anonymous 4th edition (2001), chap. 1. 17. ‘The Bill W. Carl Jung Letters” (1963), The Grapevine (New York: The AA Grapevine, June 1994), pp. 48–53. 18. Matthew 5:3–6 (Bible references in this chapter are from New American Bible). 19. Matthew 11:28. 20. Luke 15:20. 21. John 10. 22. Matthew 7:7. 23. John 13:34–35. 24. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), p. 153. 25. Shepard Siegel, “The Mystery of Heroin Overdose,” Drugs and Behavior, 5th ed., ed. William A. McKim (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), p. 45.

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Chapter Eighteen 1. Matthew 26:38–39; 26:41–42; 26:45–46, respectively. (All Bible references in this chapter are from New American Bible.) 2. Luke 23:46 3. Ibid., 23:34 4. Kenneth A. Bryson, Persons and Immortality (Amsterdam & New York: Edition Rodopi B.V., 1999), pp. 100–101. 5. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). 6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper, 1962). 7. Anthony Imbrosciano, “Kierkegaard’s Individual,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 33:4 (December 1993), pp. 443–448. 8. William Gerber, The Deepest Questions You Can Ask About God (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1995). 9. Rem B. Edwards, What Caused the Big Bang? (Atlanta & Amsterdam; Editions Rodopi, B.V., 2001). 10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago, Ill.: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 1, q. 2. a. 3. 11. Carl Jung, Answer to Job, trans. Richard Francis Carrington Hull (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1992). 12. Robert Buckman, Can We Be Good Without God? (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2002), p. 259. 13. Alan Richardson ed., A Theological Word Book of The Bible (London: SCM Press, 1957), esp. p. 89. 14. Ibid., p. 96. 15. Numbers 31:2–3 16. Alan Richardson ed., A Theological Word Book of The Bible, p. 90. 17. Exodus, 34:6–7 18. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 3. 19. Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), p. 204. 20. Leo Booth, When God Becomes a Drug (New York: Penguin Putnam 1991), p. 9. 21. Ibid., p. 12. 22. Kenneth A. Bryson “Emile Meyerson (1859–1933),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Chapter Nineteen 1. Matthew 22:34–40 (All Bible references in this chapter are from New American Bible.) 2. Arun Gandhi “Nonviolence—The Only Hope,” M.K. Ghandi Institute for Nonviolence, http://www.gandhiinstitute.org/ 3. Dalai Lama, “Epilogue,” Geography of Religion: Where God Lives, Where Pilgrims Walk, eds. Susan Tyler Hitchcock and John L. Esposito (Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2004), pp. 396–397. 4. 2 Timothy: 6–8.


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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Kenneth A. Bryson is professor of philosophy at Cape Breton University. He published Persons and Immortality (1999) with Rodopi VIBS. He teaches courses in death and dying, spirituality and health, and religion and health to nursing students, and courses in science, technology, and human affairs. Constantin V. Ponomareff is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He has published two collections of essays with Rodopi: The Spiritual Geography of Modern Writing (1997) and In the Shadow of the Holocaust and Other Essays (1998). He also published a chapter on Dostoevsky in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (2001).


INDEX A.A. World Conference (1950), 127 Abraham, 21, 87, 88, 106, 135, 136, 154, 162 Absolute, 12, 90, 101, 105, 108, 145, 164, 167, 168 four As, 124, 125 absolutism, Russian, 25 abstinence, 116–119, 122–124, 129, 132, 133, 138, 149 abuse, 19 child a., 164 substance a., 82, 83, 90, 116, 117, 119–123, 125, 131, 142, 143 acceptance, 142, 143, 148 artistic a., 57 a. of death, 153 a. of dependency, 126, 134 a. of spiritual principles, 124 achievement(s), 18, 51, 100 Achterberg, Jeanne, 47 act(ion)(s), 71–73, 75, 78, 94, 98, 100, 104, 124, 125, 127, 128, 138, 141, 159 compassionate a., 112 creative a., 80, 155 destructive/harmful a., 139, 156 divine a., 94 epistemological a., xiii, 3 ethical/good/right/virtuous, 74, 93, 109, 137 a. of faith, 106 a. of free will, 135 healing a., 16 intelligent a., xiii, 79, 99 irrational a., 123 redemptive a., 88 social a., 80, 112, 154 spiritual a., 4, 88, 99, 108, 109, 115, 147, 148, 153, 160, 163 symbolic a., 27 addict(ion)(s), xiii, 88, 116–118, 120– 124, 128, 129, 132, 137, 142, 143, 145–149, 159

“The Adulteress” (Camus), 43 afterlife, 81, 82, 86, 104, 129, 165–167 alcoholi(cs)(sm), 83, 116–120, 122, 124, 127, 128, 131, 134, 135, 142, 143, 147, 149 types of a., 117, 119 Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), 122, 123, 126, 127, 132, 133, 137, 141, 145, 146, 148 A.A. traditions, 127 alienation, 111 Allah, 21, 22, 86, 139, 162, 168 Amnesty International, 9 anger, 103, 111, 116, 139, 140, 141, 156, 164 annus mirabilis (miracle year), 51 anonymity, 128, 148 Anselm of Canterbury, 85, 99, 144 Answer to Job (Jung), 155 anxiety(ies)(y), 62, 100, 102, 136, 142, 151, 153 Approaches to God (Maritain), 155 Arabs, 54 archetype(s), 61, 62 Aristotle, 163 Nichomachean Ethics, 122 aromatherapy, 1, 162 art(ists), xi–xiii, 1, 4, 9, 11, 17, 19, 20, 28, 29, 37, 39, 52, 57, 58, 74, 77, 78, 80, 98, 154 artistic endeavor, 1 Ashabo, Christiana, 132 Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC), 89 Association of American Medical Colleges, 90 associations, 86, 88, 91, 105–107, 110– 112, 129, 141, 145, 148, 154, 164–166 atomic bomb, 54, 158 atoms, carbon, 77 atonement, 17, 24, 38

198


atrocit(ies)(y), 12, 17, 35, 38, 53 attitude(s), 24, 98, 102, 109–112, 126, 146–148, 152, 157 Augustine of Hippo, 16, 89 Aurobindo, Sri, 12 Auschwitz, 11, 155 autonomy, 76, 111,121, 127, 128, 138, 148 awakening, spiritual, 136, 138, 142, 143 awareness, 9, 10, 47, 66, 71, 72, 84, 90, 110, 133, 142, 156 aversive therapy, 118 Ayurveda, 48 Balakirev, Mili, 28, 29 balance, xi, 1, 163 psychological b., 62 spiritual b., 41 baptism, 95, 102, 103, 106, 108 barbaric age, 39 Barnett, Lincoln, 54 Barrett, William, 18 Time of Need , 18 Batterson, John E., 125 The Beast (Munch), 57 Beautiful Lady, 20 beauty, 8, 27, 28, 52–54, 62, 77, 80, 111 behavior modification, 138 behavior(s), 75, 76, 109, 115, 118, 123 addictive/compulsive b., 118, 121– 123, 126, 128, 132, 133, 141, 146, 147, 159 compensatory b., 116, 159 coping b., 121, 122 divine b., 157 dysfunctional b., 116, 122 sinful b., 158 being(s), xii, 8, 29, 43, 46, 47, 77, 79, 80, 102, 105, 112, 137, 147. See also unconcealment B. greater than ourselves, xi, xiii, 1, 85, 95, 104, 144, 152, 153, 155, 157 cosmic b., 7 finite (corporeal) vs. eternal b., 165–167

human b., 2, 3, 10, 13, 19–21, 43, 57, 61, 71–76, 78, 93–98, 104, 106, 110, 111, 115, 147 b. at human death, 82 infinite chain of b., 8 intelligibility of b., 167, 168 b. into non-b., 59 b. vs. order of time, 105, 155 others as separate b., 108 poetry of b., 42 primacy of b., 3, 81 rational b., 154 sacred/spiritual b., 17, 21, 51, 58, 81, 87 b. in search of meaning, 100 timeless sense of b., 66 b.-toward-salvation, 107 unity of b., 53 v. as a verb, 78 Being and Time (Heidegger), 152 belief(s), 1, 7, 75, 92, 133, 147, 152 culturally based b., 75, 86 metaphysical b., 85 b. in random vs. created origin of universe, 106 b. vs. reality, 85 religious/spiritual b., xii, 7, 61, 79, 81, 85, 87, 88, 90, 94, 96, 99, 102, 105, 128, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141, 155–157, 160, 162, 163, 166 b. about substance abuse/recovery, 117, 122, 124, 127, 134, 140 belonging, sense of, 47 Bely, Andrey, 19, 20 Petersburg, 20 Berdyaev, Nokolay, 24, 26 Berlin, Isaiah, 23, 37 best interest, 76, 127, 128 big bang science/theory, 82, 105, 154 Billington, James, 28 Blessed Trinity, 93, 94, 96, 103, 107, 110, 113, 139, 154 Blok, Alexander Aleksandrovich, 19, 20, 24 Verses on a Beautiful Lady, 24

Index blood products, 163 bod(ies)(y), 1, 55, 74, 83, 147, 167 afterlife state w/out b., 165 human vs. cosmic b., 48 mind-b. issues, 3, 4, 48, 71, 75, 81, 86, 87, 90, 101, 108, 122, 123, 134, 149 resurrection of/risen b., 81, 103, 166 soul/b. distinction, 81, 102 Booth, Leo, 159 Borchert, Wolfgang, 32 The Man Outside, 32 Boris Godunov (Mussorgsky), 27 Borodin, Alexander, 28 bottoms, personal, 135 Bowra, Cecil Maurice, 31, 32 brain, 46, 47, 55, 76, 84, 85, 87 b. chemistry/physiology of addiction, 118, 121–123, 128, 133, 141 damage to b., 107 left/right b., 75, 133 b. waves, 17 breath (pneuma, spiritus, ruah), 85, 100, 101 Brecht, Bertolt, 19 Brinton, Crane, 25, 26 Bronze Horseman (Pushkin), 17 Bruntland, Gro Harlem, 110 Bruntland Commission Report, 2 brutalization, 23 Bryson, Kenneth A., xi, xii, 1, 69 Persons and Immortality, 167 Buchman, Frank, 124 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 65 Buckman, Robert, 74, 84, 85, 156 Buddhism, 1, 10, 12, 137, 138, 165, 168 Buddhist precepts, 137 Burke, Kenneth, 19 Burkhardt, Margaret, 86 Cs, five, 124 CAGE questionnaire, 121 Calliope, 54 calm, 17, 65, 139 Camus, Albert, xiii, xiv, 8, 17, 41–43, 49

199 “The Adulteress,” 43 The Fall, 41 Notebooks: 1942–1951, 42 The Plague, 17, 41, 49 The Stranger, 41 Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn), 17 capabilit(ies)(y), 18, 72, 94, 106 capacity to respond, 62 Capra, Frtjof, 45–47, 104, 113 The Tao of Physics, 45, 47 The Web of Life, 45, 47 Carlo, William, 80, 81 causa(lity)(tion), 45, 116 celebration(s), 53, 77, 83 certainty, 18, 61 change of heart, 110, 142 character, 125, 146, 154, 158, 166 characteristics, identity, 134, 165, 166 bodily vs. spiritual, 76, 90, 153 charity, 27, 111, 139, 159 Chekhov, Anton, 24 chemical use for coping, 121 chiliastic and eschatological propensit(ies)(y), 24 choice(s), 2, 73, 76, 84, 115, 134–136, 158, 159 ethical/moral c., 76, 85, 116, 160 God c., 78 maladaptive c., 122 Chopra, Deepak, 48 Quantum Healing, 48 Christian(ity)(s), xii, xiii, 1, 12, 16, 58, 88, 97, 106, 109, 136, 137, 140, 154, 158, 160, 162, 164 c. church, 9, 10 c. environment, 155, 156 c. life, 136 c. message, 107, 159 c. movement from Old to New Testament, 88 c. philosophy of love, 108 c. response, 102 c. story, 88, 137, 138 c. theology, 99 c. think(ers)(ing), 16, 112

200


Christian(ity)(s) (continued) c. tradition, 54 c. view of Jesus, 158 c. way, 102 c. weddings, 103 Christology, 94 CIDA, 9 civilization, 7, 18, 94, 105 European c., 31 reigious c., 23 claim(s), 73, 75, 79, 81, 82, 93, 104, 116, 156 deontological c., 163 empirical c., 158 psychological c., 75 religious c., 1, 163 Clark, Katerina, 20 cleansing, 38, 87 cocaine, 128, 129 co-dependents, 122 coexistence, 54 cogito, 3 cognition, 46, 47 commitment, 136, 154 common sense, 160 communion, 1, 43, 78, 81, 83, 87, 99, 106, 108, 165, 167 communism, 20, 53 community, 111, 167 faith c., 86, 159, 161, 162 c. interventions, 149 medical c., 149 Muslim c., 161 c. programs, 121 recovery c., 90 scientific c., 47, 106, 117, 158 compassion, 19, 21, 23–25, 41, 80, 82, 88, 90, 91, 111, 112, 135, 138, 148, 166 divine c., 21, 144, 157, 159, 163 c. in the Koran, 22 Siddhartha’s c., 165 compulsive cycle, 128 concentration camps, 10, 155, 158. See also death camps

concepts, xiii, 71, 73, 77, 79 A.A. c., 127, 128 analogical c., 154 spiritual c., 123 concerns, 18, 41, 102 selfish c., 85 Concluding Unscientific Postscripts (Kierkegaard), 136 confession, 117, 124 confidence,22 124 confidentiality, 76 Confucianism, 137 connect(ion)(or)(s), spiritual, xii, xiii, 1–3, 17–19, 41, 42, 45–47, 53, 54, 58, 62, 63, 65, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89–99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 113, 115, 122, 123, 129, 135, 137, 144, 147, 149, 154, 155, 158– 162, 167 connectedness, 47, 90 interc. of life, 45 conscience, 17, 25, 27, 38, 39 consciousness, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 19, 20, 35, 45–48, 62, 65–67, 72, 74, 77–79, 81, 87, 100, 105, 125, 144, 146, 152, 153, 160, 166, 167 self-c., 71, 94 consequentialism, 127 consistency, internal, 77 control, 11, 18, 45, 76, 79, 88, 90, 103, 110, 111, 120–122, 133–135, 138, 143, 144, 146, 148, 152, 153, 156 conversion, 124, 125, 135, 143 conviction, 28, 63, 124 cosmos, 47, 48, 62, 67, 87 counseling, 101, 116, 121, 122, 133, 143 courage, 8, 41, 42, 138, 139, 142, 143 cowardice, 139 Craig, Stephen William Lane, 105, 113 craving(s), 128, 132, 133, 144, 162 Crawford, Tom, 122, 129, 131 creation, 59, 72, 80, 87, 98, 107, 109, 112, 115, 155

Index creativity, 51, 52, 57, 90 Crosby, Donald, 10 crucifixion narrative, 137 crusades, Christian, 16 Cui, César, 28 culture, 7, 19, 75, 86, 90, 115, 157, 160–162 East Indian c., 75 German c., 38 materialistic c., 1 Nazi c., 37 c. of the New Testament, 163 Russian c., 23, 25 poverty of intellectual c., 23 scientific c., 23 c. of violence/non-violence, 164 Western c., 18 Cunningham, Graeme M., 120, 121 cur(e)(ing), 1, 86, 90, 123, 131, 132, 149 curse, 54, 157 Cvek, Peter P., 109, 113 da Gama, Vasco, 165 Dalai Lama, 138, 166 Dauphinais, Michael, 93, 97, 112 imago Dei, 112 Davies, Paul, 106, 113 death camps, 89 The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy), 152 death, 8, 16, 27, 31, 42, 57, 58, 62, 81, 82, 88, 134, 135, 137, 142, 145, 151–153, 163, 165–168 d. of Jesus, 102, 103, 151, 156, 160, 164 near-d. experience, 84, 129 return to God after d., 154 deed(s), 124 evil d., 10 d. of Jesus, 103 good d., 139 The Deepest Questions You Can Ask about God (Gerber), 154 deity, 62, 89, 156 Dejin-Karlsson, E., 83 democracy, 18, 127

201 dependenc(e)(y), drug/substance, 116– 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136–138, 142–144, 146–149, 154 depression, 27, 59, 128, 135, 138, 142 alcohol d., 143 Derzhavin, Gavrila, 23 Descartes, René, 3, 73, 74, 78, 104, 105, 108, 110 desire(s), 124, 125 d. to attain the Divine image, 167 d. to forgive, 157 d. generated by love, 100 d. for good, 84, 115 d. to help others, 148 d. for revenge, 164 d. to serve God, 154 d. to stop drinking, 126, 127, 138, 148 despair, xi, xiv, 11, 25, 26, 42, 101, 133, 151 destiny, 11, 21, 28, 67 destruction, 17, 19, 20, 31, 85, 101, 109– 111, 137, 142, 157, 162 The Destruction (Nossack), 31 developing countries, 76, 77 diagnosis, 17, 120, 121, 132 Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), 119–121, 132 dichotomy, 21, 51 differences, xi, 47, 75, 112, 128, 166, 167 dignity, 111, 127, 140, 145, 164 Dionysius the Areopagite, 66 disaster, 31 disciples, 15, 16, 38, 39, 107, 141, 145, 151 disease, 2, 3, 15, 48, 62, 82, 86, 90, 91, 101 addiction as d., 143, 149 alcoholism as d., 116–118, 120–123, 127, 131, 134, 149 dysfunctional d., 142 disillusionment, 26 distress, 120, 137 diversity, 98, 106, 167 cultural d., 160


202

divin(e)(ity), the, 10, 12, 72, 76, 80, 103, 108, 144, 161 d. nature, 94, 95, 97, 98, 106, 110, 113, 144, 154, 157

duality of the, 93, 96, 102, 103, 111 tripartite nature of the d., 95, 96, 98, 99 divorce(d), 3, 88, 159 DNA, 76, 165 Donovan, Erin, 119 Donovan, Thomas, 142 dopamine, 118, 121–123, 128, 132, 145, 149 Dostoevsky, Feodor, 17, 20, 24–26, 29, 57 The Idiot, 24 “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” 20 “Notes from Underground,” 17, 25 doubt, 7, 74, 139 dream(s), 8, 61, 62, 126 Cartesian d., 3 drink(ers)(ing), 57, 115–119, 121–123, 126, 127, 131–135, 138, 142, 144, 148 controlled d., 117, 119, 122, 133, 135, 138 d. trajectory, 141 drug(s), 121, 128, 129, 132, 147 d. addict(s), 115 d. of choice, 119, 138, 147 d. dependency, 119, 122 d. free, 129 d. problems, 131 d. reward, 119 d. use, 121, 122, 135 dualism, 71, 88, 108, 165, 166 Dusters, 38 Edwards, Rem B., 154, 155 Who Caused the Big Bang?, 154 ego(tism), 2, 72, 75, 105, 106, 115, 142, 148. See also self deflation of e., 126 Einstein, Albert, 51–55, 82 Eliot, T. S., xiii, 31–35 “The Wasteland,” 31–35

emotion(s), xi, 2–4, 41, 53, 72, 73, 75, 78, 82, 83, 86, 88, 115, 116, 121– 125, 132, 133, 135, 138–142, 146–149, 158, 159, 161 empowerment, 2, 17, 73, 76, 79, 93, 99, 108, 109, 147, 148 emptiness, 8, 32, 59, 74, 127 The End of Faith (Harris), 158 enem(ies)(y), 15, 107, 157, 163 energ(ies)(y), 8, 12, 17, 58, 105, 110 cosmic e., 47 creative e., 80, 85, 88 healing e., 7, 45, 48 intellectual e., 51 mystical e., 45 restorative e., 89 spiritual e., 1, 90, 101, 102, 115 den Enkelte (purity of heart), 87, 136 enlightenment, 1, 165 European e., 23, 24 Russian e., 24 environment, 1, 2, 47, 54, 71–76, 80–82, 84, 86, 92, 94, 98, 99, 105, 106, 109–113, 115, 135, 139–141, 147, 149, 156, 165 envy, 82, 111, 139–141, 146 epistemology, 94 Epistle to the Corinthians, First, 111 equality, 93, 95, 111, 128, 140, 148 error, subjective vs. objective, 132 eschatological propensity of Russian character, 24 eschatology96, 164 essence, 10, 16, 43, 47, 74, 100, 112, 125 e. vs. existence, 80, 81, 154, 166 e. of Jesus’ love, 103 eternity, 31, 42, 95 ethical base, 127 Eucharistic offering, 38 Euclid, 3 Evening on Karl Johan Street (Munch), 57 event(s), xii, 10, 46, 49, 61, 84, 88, 155, 157, 161, 164 death as e., 152 e. vs. process, 124

203

Index event(s) (continued) redemptive e., 106 e. of the Trinity, 106 visible e., 45 evil(doers), xiii, 2, 7, 10–13, 21, 25, 27, 29 86, 101, 104, 108, 109, 115, 141, 146, 157, 158, 160 Evil and the God of Love (Hick), 104 evolution, 46 existence, 1, 2, 25, 42, 46, 66, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 90, 97, 99, 100, 103, 111, 112, 137, 139, 154, 155, 157, 165–168 e. of afterlife, 86 e. of evil, 10, 11, 158 e. vs. finite essence, 153 e. of God, xi, 62, 63, 78, 79, 84, 85, 90, 91, 94, 96, 100, 101, 108, 113, 134, 136, 155, 158, 162 e. of higher power, 134, 136, 144 human e., xii, 8, 9, 12, 17, 41, 42, 61, 82, 89, 104–106 e. of isolated center of interiority, 74 e. of other minds, 73 relational e., 105 experiences, 3, 12, 41, 90, 105 e. of addicts, 123, 125, 126, 134, 143, 146, 148 ghostly e., 84 Jesus connected to human e., 104 mystic e., 12 near-death e., 84 numinous e., 62 paranormal e., 84 religious e., 62 e. of the spiritual/sacred, 8, 84, 85 temporal e., 159 traumatic e., 32, 49, 89 expiation, 39 expression, xii, 23, 27, 29, 39, 53, 58, 66, 67, 72, 75, 79, 85–87, 97, 136, 138, 154, 157, 161 self-e., 94 extension, 73, 75, 82, 83 e. of the environment, 147

self-e., 108, 112, 165, 166 Fackenheim, Emil, 11 failures, 88 faith (pistis), 15, 16, 38, 53, 62, 85, 87, 93–95, 106, 111, 136, 137, 139, 154, 166, 168 f. community, 86, 159, 161, 162 Islamic f., 162 f. vs. reason, 136, 154 faithful, the, 87, 88, 137, 139, 162, 163, 165 The Fall (Camus), 41 falsehood, 41 falsity, 124 fate, 8, 39, 54, 57, 61, 144 fear(fulness), 11, 40, 43, 48, 57, 82, 88, 102, 103, 126, 136, 146, 147, 152, 159, 164 alcoholic f., 142 f.-inspiring pressence, 39 Fedotov, George P., 23 feelings, xii, 3, 73, 75, 83, 121, 124, 125, 133, 146, 159 Fenske, Else, 49 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 19 The Flounder (Grass), 39 Fölsing, Albrecht, 51–54 force, xi, 7–9, 12, 45, 90 life f., 10, 47, 58, 102 material f., 28 nihilist f., 37 forgiveness, 88, 111, 112, 138, 139, 145, 153, 156–159, 166 44 Questions (A.A.), 127 four steps of A.A., 124, 125 Frankl, Victor, 89, 101, 113 Man’s Search for Meaning, 89 free will, 10, 103, 135, 158 Freud, Sigmund, 61 friendship with God, 99 fundamentalists, 157 future generations, 25, 109, 110

204


gambl(ers)(ing), 116, 121–123, 135, 147 gas chambers, 38 generosity, 139 genetic screening, 76, 159 genius, 27, 29, 51, 52, 54, 74 genome, human, 2, 134 gentleness, God’s, 157 Gerber, William, 154 The Deepest Questions You Can Ask about God, 154 Gillis of Rome, 80 gluttony, 139, 141 goal(s), 7, 40, 61, 86, 87, 98, 140, 144, 162 g. of Buddhism, 137 g. of diagnostic questionnaires, 120 g. of medicine, 86 g. of religion/spirituality, 87, 101 g. of 12-step programs, 123–125, 133 ultimate g., 141 god(s), 39, 67, 163 ancient g., 62 false g., 19 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35, 38 Gogol, Nikolay, 24–26 The Overcoat, 24 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Arseny Arkad’evich, 27–29 Sunless, 27, 29 good(ness), 2, 7, 10–13, 21, 25, 26, 29, 76, 80, 84, 109, 111, 115, 146, 158, 160 public good, 18 Supreme G., 66 goods, 54, 91 grace, 10, 42, 95, 97, 106, 107 Grass, Günter, 17, 37–40, 49 The Flounder, 39 The Tin Drum, 17, 37, 49 Great Purge, 53 greed, 2, 79, 84, 88, 110, 111, 135, 139, 140, 141, 147 greenhouse gases, 158 grief, 3, 37, 49, 136, 161 guidance, 124, 125 guilt, 27, 37, 38, 118, 133, 142, 146

habitus, 109 Hagia Sophia, 58 happiness (unhappiness), 24, 41, 85, 102, 126 hardening of the heart, 111 hardwired, 160 harm reduction, 116, 122, 129 harmony (disharmony), xiii, 18, 41, 53, 72, 73, 89, 101, 102, 107, 159, 160 Harpur, Tom, 15 Harris, Sam, 158 The End of Faith, 158 hate, 11, 43, 82, 88, 111, 139 Hawking, Stephen William, 105 heal(ers)(ing), xi–xiii, 1, 2, 8, 15–19, 21, 35, 38, 47, 48, 74, 75, 86–90, 149, 159, 162 h. energy, 45, 48 holistic h., 1, 91 h. impulse, 18 h. intent, 21 metaphysical h., 47 pseudo-h., 16 quantum h., 48 spiritual h., 1, 15, 101, 134 health, 75, 76, 90, 122 alternative h. techniques, 162 h. care team, 86, 90 h. effects of symbols and rituals, 75 h. energy, 47 environmental h., 147 h. focus, 74 holistic h., 149 h. issues, 101 h. perspective, 123 h. phase of recovery, 123 h. promotion, 101 spiritual h. dimension, 48 h. techniques of new age medicine, 162 h. wisdom and power, 48, 62 h. work, 149 heart, 42, 83, 84, 87–89, 98, 101, 106– 112, 128, 136, 141, 142, 151, 153–155, 158–160, 164

Index Hebrew history, 157 hegemony, 79, 110 Heidegger, Martin, 74, 78–80, 82, 110, 152 Being and Time, 152 hell, 11, 21, 83, 99, 102, 126, 141 helplessness, 57 Hemingway, Ernest, 19 Henry of Ghent, 80 heritage, 53 Hick, John, 104, 105, 112, 158 Evil and the God of Love, 104 high (drug intoxication), 119, 128, 129 Higher Power, 1, 75, 84, 86, 90, 92, 112, 115, 134, 138, 141, 149, 168 Hinduism, 10–12, 21, 137, 168 Hiroshima, 54, 158 historicism, 104 historicity, 104 history, 7, 9, 78, 94, 100, 102–106, 112, 156, 162, 164, 167 Christ in h., 98 h. of divine image, 93 h. of evil, 8, 11 Hebrew h., 157 Indian h., 39, 40 h. of redemption/salvation, 95, 157 h. of scientific inductions, 160 Hitti, Philip, 22 Hodin, Josef Paul, 58 Hollis, James, 67 holocaust, 17 Jewish h., 11, 38, 53, 54 nuclear h., 11 post-h. world, 11 Holy Ghost (Spirit), 15, 16, 93–95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106–108, 112, 141, 154 holy water(s), 87 Homer, 54 honesty, 82, 115, 124, 125, 127 h. in recovery, 131, 132, 139, 148 Honolka, Kurt, 29 honor, 135, 163 h. killings, 163

205 hope(lessness), xi, xiv, 11, 25, 32, 42, 57, 62, 87, 90, 103, 108, 126, 144, 148 horizon, temporal, 78, 104, 141 Hubble, Edwin, 82 human beings, 2, 3, 10, 13, 19–21, 43, 57, 71–75, 78, 95–98, 106, 110, 111, 115, 147 human condition/nature, xiii, 1, 2, 18, 71– 74, 84, 96, 103, 156 humanitarian organizations, 9 human(ity)(kind), xii, 1, 9, 16–20, 22, 24, 33, 41, 53, 58, 137, 156, 168 inhumanity, 38, 39 h. of Jesus, 158 humility, 8, 24, 138, 139 “I,” 96, 105, 141. See also ego iambic pentameter, 77 icon, 31 i. painting, 23 iconoclasm, 20 iconoclastic mentality, 20 ideal(ist)(ism)(s), 7, 23–26, 51, 61 identification, 83, 125, 133, 140, 142, 143, 148 i. with universe (participation mystique), 67 identit(ies)(y), xiii, 3, 39, 81, 82, 104, 107, 109, 159, 160, 165, 166 unconscious i., 62 ideological superstructure, 16 ignorabimus (we will not know), 94 ignoramus (we do not know), 94 illness, 3, 19, 48, 90, 92, 108 addiction i., 124 i. vs. disease, 86, 91, 101, 122, 123 mental i., 57, 58, 82, 83 mind-body i., 149 spiritual i., 101 illusion(s), 1, 3, 24, 61, 62, 73, 84, 111, 112, 132, 133, 165 image(ry), 32, 34, 35, 37–39, 41, 45, 47, 48, 61

206


image(ry) (continued) i. of God/divine, 1, 72–75, 78, 84, 86, 92–113, 115, 141, 145, 148, 153, 154, 159–164, 166, 167 (see also likeness of God) religious i., 62, 63 self-i., 2, 122, 124, 147 imagination, 25, 28, 41, 48, 52, 57, 65, 73 imago Dei (image of God), 94, 99, 102, 106 imago Dei (Dauphinais), 112 imbalance, 7 Imbrosciano, Anthony, 153 immune system, 17, 48, 147 impatience, 139 impetus, 51 impulse, 100 creative i., 37 healing i., 16, 18 regressive i., 67 religious i., 53 sacred/spiritual i., 7–9, 24, 25, 47, 54 transcendental i., 37 vital i., 95 impurities of blood products, 163 Incarnation, 106 individuation, 81, 88, 165 Jungian i., 156 influences, 124, 147 insight(s), 35, 43, 45, 53, 65, 80, 83, 87, 94–96, 103, 133, 138, 144, 145, 151–153, 155, 157, 158, 160 insignificance, 76 insult, 163 integrity, physiological of an organism, 1 intellect(ual)(s), xi, 24, 72, 73, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 109, 141, 154 agent vs. passive i., 73 discursive i., 65 European i., 53 finite i., 93 scientific i., 48 spiritual i., 73 i. vs. will, 94 intellection, 79 intelligence, 3, 42, 82, 93, 99

cosmic i., 48 existential i., 54 subliminal i., 45, 48 intention(ality), 83, 110 interest, 24, 126 best i., 76, 127, 128 moral i., 135 philosophic i., 41 i. in recovery, 148 technical i., 54 interiority, 3, 74, 98, 105 intersubjectivity, 83, 108 intuition, 3, 20, 29, 45, 51, 99 healing i., 17 spiritual i., 8, 42 Isaac, 21, 87, 135, 136, 154 Islamism, xiii, 1 Israelites, 157, 163 James, William, 65, 75, 85, 87, 89, 124, 135–137, 163 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 124 Janssens, Aloysius, 100, 102 jealousy, 88, 111 Jealousy (Munch), 57 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 163 Jesus Christ, 2, 15, 16, 21, 34, 38, 39, 83, 88, 94, 95, 100, 102–104, 106– 109, 111, 112, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 151–154, 156, 158–160, 162, 163 teachings of, 15, 16, 108, 111, 112, 154, 158, 159 Jewish homeland, 54 Jews, 54, 88, 155, 158, 161, 162 Job, 21, 155, 156, 162 The Idiot (Dostoevsky), 24 A Journey from Petersburg to Mosco (Radishchev), 23 joy(ousness), 8, 22, 26, 57, 65, 83, 108, 145, 156 Judaism, xiii, 1, 137 Judgment Day, 21 judgment(s), xii, 3, 21, 121

Index Jung, Carl Gustav, xi, xii, 13, 61–63, 87, 88, 124, 143, 144, 155, 156 Answer to Job (Jung), 155 justice (injustice), 22, 24, 76, 108, 111, 127, 140, 153, 157, 163, 164 Kant, Immanuel, 77, 85, 99, 100 Kantemir, Antiokh, 23 Katrina, hurricane, 155, 158 Khovanshchina (Mussorgsky), 27, 28 Kierkegaard, Søren, 87, 124, 135–137, 144, 153, 154, 161 Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, 136 killings, honor, 163 kindness, 158, 164 kingdom of God/Heaven, 15, 16, 108, 124 Kluger, Jeffrey, 116 knowledge, 3, 8, 12, 18, 31, 42, 53, 65, 66, 73, 77–79, 81, 90, 94 k. of God, 80, 93, 109, 136, 154 Koestler, Arthur, 51 Koran, 21, 22, 88 Kunz, Dora, 16, 17 Laing, Ronald David, 58 language, 41, 48, 53, 83, 107, 142, 154, 158, 160 medieval l., 144 metaphorica l., 32 sacred spiritual l., 161 Lao Tzu, 66 law, 107 Christian religious l., 162 cosmic l., 12 divine/eternal/God’s l., 109, 112, 162 ethical l., 136 l. of the heart, 107, 108 l. of Holy Spirit, 108 Jewish l., 107 l. of love, 86, 108–110, 158 natural l., 109, 111 subjective relationship to objective l., 86 “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (Dostoevsky), 20

207 Lenarz, Bernard, 131, 138 Lenin, Vladimir, 20 life(span)(style), xiii, 1, 3, 7–12, 19, 24, 28, 33, 37, 42, 43, 45–47, 53, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 88, 95, 96, 98, 101, 106, 108, 110, 123, 126, 127, 129, 134, 138, 156, 159, 162–167 compulsive l., 159 conscious l., 156 end of l., 152 eternal l., 65, 87, 98, 103, 136, 154, 155, 162, 167 ethical l., 136, 158 good l., 74, 85, 111 healthy l., 2, 137 meaning of l., 86, 87, 89, 92, 100, 124, 125, 141, 152, 161 moral l., 99, 109, 135, 137, 154, 160 natural vs. supernatural l. of Jesus, 103, 136, 151, 154 l. in recovery, 142, 144–146, 149 Russian l., 23, 25 l. stages, 74 subjective l., 73 virtuous l., 94 likeness of God, 1, 72–74, 86, 92–94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 107, 108, 111–113, 141, 153, 154, 160– 162 (see also image(ry): i. of God/divine) literature, xi, xii, 1, 2, 4, 7, 31, 48, 74, 89, 117, 127, 157 Nobel Prize for l., 37 Russian l., 1, 23 liturgy, 159 liveliness, 139 living things, 2, 17, 101, 109 Lloyd Morgan’s Canon, 121 lobe(s) of the brain, 75, 84, 85, 148 logic, 52, 87, 88, 121, 129, 132, 144, 153, 155, 159 l. of the heart, 83, 88, 107 l. of non-ego state, 75 specious l., 10

208


Logos, 94–96, 104, 106 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 23 longing, xii, 37, 53, 168 Christian l. for spiritual deliverance, 27 divine l. for humankind, 22 loss(es), necessary, 3 love, 1, 8, 11, 32, 41, 42, 57, 65, 66, 76, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88–90, 94, 97–99, 108–110, 135, 136, 139, 146, 153, 162, 165, 166 Absolute l., 124, 125 l. addiction, 123 l. of God/God’s l. for humanity, 24, 77, 78, 95–100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111–113, 125, 136– 138, 141, 145, 155, 157–160, 162–164 self-l., 148 loyalty, 15, 42, 156 lucidity of mind, 41 “Lullaby” (Mussorgsky), 27 lust(fulness), 20, 84, 88, 111, 135, 11, 147 lying, 142 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 25 Mackie, John Leslie, 11 madness, 15, 39, 59, 155 Madonna (Munch), 57–59 Malecka, Teresa, 28 The Man Outside (Borchert), 32 mankind. See humankind Mann, Mary, 131 Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl), 89 Maritain, Jacques, 99, 101, 112, 155 Approaches to God, 155 Marx, Karl, 25 Mary (Mother of Jesus), 38, 95, 100 mass, 82 Mass, sacrifice of, 96 matter, potentiality of, 163 Maturana, Humberto, 46 Matus, Thomas, 104 McCarthyism, 54 McCloskey, Henry John, 11

meaning, 2, 3, 26, 32, 45, 47, 51, 52, 61, 62, 67, 75, 77, 79, 85, 90–92, 100–102, 113, 115, 116, 146, 149, 156, 161 m. of life, 86, 87, 89, 92, 100, 124, 125, 141, 152, 161 Médecins sans Frontières, 9 medicine, 1, 2, 4, 86, 89, 90, 101, 122, 149, 162, 163 complementary m., 162 herbal m., 162 Western m., 48 meditation, 1, 41, 48, 74 meetings, A.A., 117, 121–123, 134, 148 mercy, 26, 157, 158 in Koran, 21 metamorphosis, 100 metaphor(s), 1, 15, 16, 27, 28, 32, 34, 35, 39, 45, 48, 49, 66, 78, 86 metaphorical language, 32 metaphysics, 3, 12, 72, 79, 82, 155 Christian m., 160 existential m., 81 Thomistic m., 80, 94 methadone, 129 Methadone Anonymous (M.A.), 129 methamphetamine, 129 Meursault, 41, 43 Meyer, Marvin, 108 Meyerson, Emile, 159, 160 Midianites, 157 Mighty Group of Five, 28 Miller, Geri, 89 mind, 8, 12, 41, 42, 46, 47, 54, 65, 78, 79, 87, 97, 132, 144, 159, 167 Arabian m., 21 m.-body connection, 1, 3, 48, 71, 75, 81, 86, 90, 101, 108, 122, 123, 134, 149 cosmic m., 48 creative m., 51 divine image as part of m., 99 Eastern religious m., 10 other m., 73 substance-impaired m., 121

Index misconduct, sexual, 137 moderation, 117, 139 Mohammed, 22 Mongol oppression, 23 monotheism, 163 moral indictment, 35 moral tension, 25 mortality/immortality, 8, 25, 42, 43, 167 motive(s), 38 cultural m., 23 profit m., 79 therapeutic m., 39 Muhammad, 21, 161 Munch, Edvard, 57–59 The Beast, 57 Evening on Karl Johan Street, 57 Jealousy, 57 Madonna, 57–59 Night in Saint-Cloud, 57 The Scream, 57, 58 Self-Portrait, 57 The Sun, 58 The Vampire, 57 music(ians), xi, xii, 1, 7, 22, 28, 29, 34, 65, 74, 80, 89, 98, 154 musical unevenness, 29 Muslim lands, 16 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich, 27–29 Boris Godunov, 27 Khovanshchina, 27, 28 “Lullaby,” 27 Night on Bald Mountain, 27, 28 Songs and Dances of Death, 27 “Trepak,” 27 mystery, 59, 77, 78, 94, 96, 98, 100, 106, 108, 111–113, 157, 158, 160 mystics, 80, 85, 98 Christian m., 47 myth(s), 9, 49, 62 Nabokov, Vladimir, 35 Nagai-Jacobson, Mary Gail, 86 Nagasaki, 54, 158 Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.), 123, 129 nationalist aims, 27

209 Native American traditions, 47 nature, xii, 2, 7, 9, 18, 19, 28, 41–43, 46, 48, 52, 53, 62, 67, 74, 79, 85, 89, 90, 92, 109, 110, 147, 148, 151 freak of n., 39 laws of n., 54 n. as metaphor for love, 66 Nazi war machine, 38 Nazism, 53 near death experience (NDE), 84, 129 necessities of life, 76, 164 needs, 1, 8, 97, 88, 110, 167 historical and institutionalized n., 7 social n., 71 spiritual n., 78, 79, 89, 162 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 142 neighbor(s), 76, 80, 82, 83, 98, 99, 103, 107, 109, 110, 112, 141, 146, 158, 162 neqama (culture), 157. See also culture neurodevelopment, 75, 76 neuron, 128 neuroscience, 46, 84 neurotransmitter, 128 neurological activity, 76 New Testament, 21, 88, 102, 137, 156, 158, 162, 163 newcomers to A.A., 127 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 121 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 18, 37 Night in Saint-Cloud (Munch), 57 Night on Bald Mountain (Mussorgsky), 27, 28 Nightingale, Florence, 80 nihilism, 25, 29, 41, 42 Russian n., 26 No Exit (Sartre), 99 Nobel Prize, 38, 52 Noble Eightfold Path, 1, 137, 165 Noble Truths, 1, 165 Nordenfelt, Lennart, 101 Nossack, Hans Erich, 31, 35 The Destruction, 31 Notebooks: 1942–1951 (Camus), 42 “Notes of a Hunter” (Turgenev), 17, 24

210


“Notes from Underground” (Dostoevsky), 17, 25 nothingness, 74, 82 nuclear arms race, 54 Numbers, Book of, 157 numinosity, 61 nursing programs, 2 nursing students, 91 object(s), 71, 74, 83 o. of consciousness, 78, 166 o. of knowledge, 73 o. of love, 103 martyred o., 38 o. outside of consciousness, 74 o. of relationship, 144 o. of spiritual intellect, 73 objectification, 49 objectivity, 79, 87 oeuvre, 59 Old Testament, 21, 88, 141, 156–158, 162 open-mindedness, 132 openness, 7, 148 oppression, 17, 23, 76, 111 optimism, 32, 61 order, 38, 46, 52, 53, 89, 97, 98, 100, 105 natural vs. supernatural o., 96 personal-social-environmental o., 111 o. or time vs. being, 155 visible v. invisible o., 155 orgy, satanic, 155 origin of universe, 82, 95, 105, 116, 155 original sin, 10, 16, 21 The Overcoat (Gogol), 24 Oxfam, 9 pain, 8, 10, 15–17, 91, 119, 136, 137, 140, 151, 155 Palestine, 54 parable(s), 15, 108, 159 paradise, 24, 25, 27 participation mystique (identification with the universe), 67 particle(s), 45, 55, 106 partnership, 41, 78

Pasternak, Boris, 35 patient(s), 2, 17, 48, 86, 90, 91, 103, 116, 120–122, 129, 143, 149 patterns of expansion, 82 Patton, David, 125 Paul, St. (Apostle), 55, 93, 111, 166 Paz, Octavio, 42 peace, 15, 34, 43, 48, 54, 58, 62, 66, 90, 92, 98, 126, 141, 143, 146, 160, 163 p.-keeping, 9 Pendery, Mary, 119 perception, 47, 66, 79 Per-Erik, Liss, 101 perfection (imperfection), 86, 93, 97, 101, 104, 111 Perry, Ralph Barton, 135 persecution, 59 persistence, spiritual, 28 person(hood), xiii, 1–3, 12, 51, 71, 72, 82, 85, 97–99, 105, 108, 127, 152, 163–165 divine/uncreated P., 95–97, 102, 103 dysfunctional p., 122 p. vs. human being, 94, 97, 104, 106 p. of the Logos, 96 p.-making process, 3, 4, 71–75, 79, 81, 83, 86, 88, 91, 93, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104–106, 108–113, 122, 124, 129, 139, 147–149, 154, 161, 162, 164–168 personalities, 76, 98, 102, 104, 106, 107, 112, 126, 127, 133, 138, 155, 156 Persons and Immortality (Bryson), 167 pessimism, 32 Petersburg (Bely), 20 phenomenology, 83, 108, 125 philosoph(ers)(ies)(y), 2–4, 10, 24, 41, 46, 47, 54, 62, 65, 74, 77, 78, 82, 140, 151, 154 Christian p., 108, 155 existential p., 132 Greek p., 17 Marcel vs. Descartes’ p., 108, 112 rational p., 135

Index philosoph(ers)(ies)(y) (continued) social p., 18, 45, 83 p. study of spirituality, 89 Pimen, 27 pity, 15, 23, 24, 29, 157 self-p. 126, 139 place, xi, xii, 13, 16, 21 geography of p., 72, 75 The Plague (Camus), 17, 41, 49 pleasure(s) 128, 129 p.-inducing chemicals, 121 p. signal, 128 plurality of saving powers, 163 poet(ry)(s), xii, 1, 7, 17–20, 27, 28, 31, 32, 35, 42, 48, 54, 65, 74, 78, 80, 85, 98, 154 democratizing p., 23 Eliot’s p., 31 symbolist p., 19 political institutions, 42 political leader(s), 20 politics, 126 pollution, 2, 4, 86, 109 Ponomareff, Constantin V., xi, xii, 5 population, world, 8, 76 possessions, 141 Postman, Neil, 1 poverty, 27, 108 powerlessness, 121, 126, 132, 134, 138 prayer(s), 57, 86, 125, 144, 148, 151, 159 p. rugs, 87 Serenity p., 142, 143 Praz, Mario, 37 pregnancy, 83 presence, sacred/spiritual/divine, xi, 10, 13, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 42, 54, 65, 80, 84, 99, 100, 104, 106, 108, 111, 115, 143, 147, 148, 155 principles, psychological or spiritual, 4, 85, 124, 133–135, 140, 146, 149, 160 privacy, 76 problem(s), xi, 83, 120–122, 128, 131, 158, 159 p. mentality, 108

211 prohibition against image making, 61 prolegomenon, 160 promise(s), 85, 96, 112, 118, 126, 133, 138, 145, 157 A.A. promises, 133, 148, 149 Promised Land, 53, 88 proof(s), 61 spiritual p., 13, 22 prophecies, humanitarian, 25 prophet(s), 15, 18, 21 false p., 16, 162 proposition(s), 74, 75, 158 protagonist, 43 protection, 145 Prusak, Bernard P., 103, 104 psyche, 62, 63, 67, 86, 88, 89, 112, 115, 133, 146, 148, 156 Russian p., 25 psychical functions, 62 psychoanalysis, 87 psychological malady, 31 psychology, 2, 4, 7, 45, 63, 74, 89 p. of Adam and Eve, 42 analytical p., 144 gestalt p., 46 p. of satori, 12 psychotherapy, 133, 143 psychotic episodes, 57 punishment, 157, 163 eternal p., 21 God’s p., 158 purity, 124 p. of heart, 87, 136, 153, 154 Pushkin, Alexander, 17, 25, 27 Bronze Horseman, 17 Quantum Healing (Chopra), 48 questionnaire(s), diagnostic, 120, 121, 131, 132 racism, 20 Radishchev, Alexander Nikolaevich, 23 A Journey from Petersburg to Mosco, 23 Rahner, Karl, 94–96, 98, 104, 106, 112, 113

212


rationalis(m)(t)(s), 77, 80, 81, 90, 135, 144 rationalization, 57 reality (unreality), xi, xii, 8, 15, 17, 20, 39, 42, 45–47, 57, 61, 66, 80, 85, 90, 129, 132, 147, 159 r. of human beings, 104 r. of Jesus/God, 100, 101 noumenal r., 18 quantum r., 45 social r., 19 reason(ing), xii, 3, 71–73, 78, 80, 83, 89, 111, 125, 126, 132, 136, 144, 153, 154, 158, 160, 164, 166 logic of r., 87, 88 natural r., 98 (see also understanding) principle of sufficient r., 82, 96, 109, 155, 159, 160 rebirth, 1, 20, 137, 165 recognition, xiv, 76, 143 recovery, 31, 83, 117, 122–127, 129, 132, 134, 136, 138–143, 146–149, 158, 159 r. programs, 129, 133, 139, 140 recovery program mentality, 140 Redemption, 16, 31, 99, 101, 102, 156, 157, 160 reductive view, 74, 89 reike, 162 reinforcement, 118, 119, 133, 138 r. model of addiction, 116, 119 relation(ship)(s), xii, 3, 12, 18, 71–74, 82–84, 86, 87, 92, 94, 110, 111, 138, 141, 144, 157, 166 r. with the All, 165 causal r., 46 distinction between types of r., 108 dysfunctional r., 159 emotional r., 57 environmental r., xii, 3, 109 r. with God/Higher Power, 134, 136, 137, 141, 144, 145, 155, 156, 159, 161–163 loving r., 87, 94, 97–99, 106, 108, 110–112, 165, 166 nurturing r. with parents, 165

role of r. in recovery, 134 r. with the sacred, xi–xiii, 72, 76, 78, 87–89 structural r., 46 r. with truth, 132 r. with universe, 34, 79 relativism, cultural, 164 relativity, 52, 160 relaxation, 17 religion(s) (religare, relegere), xi, 1, 2, 4, 7–9, 15, 42, 51, 52, 62, 72, 74, 88–90, 97, 126, 135, 137–139, 145, 159, 161, 162, 164, 166 Abraham r., xiii, 88, 106, 137, 145, 154, 162, 165, 168 authentic r., 87, 102 Christian r., 99, 137 Eastern/Western r., xiii, 1, 10, 12, 89, 137, 160, 164–167 Islamic r., 162 Lutheran r., 57 Mosaic r., 61 organized r., 87 r. vs. spirituality, 86, 87 secular r., 25 Renaissance, 23–25 Renouvier, Charles, 135 resentment, 82, 92, 139, 146 resources, 111 medical r., 76 psychosocial r., 83 spiritual r., 12 respect, 79, 80, 111, 112, 127, 145, 148, 166 responsibility, 41, 71, 76, 94, 105, 108, 109 restitution, 124, 125 restlessness, 40, 115 existential r., 84, 89, 91, 100–102, 149, 161 retribution, 157, 163 reuptake, 128 revenge, 88, 111, 157, 164 revival, 31 spiritual r., 24

Index revivalist movement, 117 revolutionary, a, 153, 154 reward(s), 118, 119, 128, 136, 168 Richardson, Alan, 157 A Theological Word Book of the Bible, 157 rights, 18, 111 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 35 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay, 28 Rio Accord, 2 ritual(s), xiii, 1, 75, 86–88, 102, 159, 162 Roach, William, 139 romantic(ism)(s), 17, 19, 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19 rules of conduct, 126 Rurik Dynasty, 27 Russian Revolution, 20, 24 Russian society, 17, 23, 25 sacred, the, xi–xiv, 1, 7–10, 12, 13, 20, 25–27, 29, 31, 35, 37–40, 42, 43, 45, 54, 57, 62, 65–67, 72, 74, 80, 86–88, 141, 143, 148, 161, 162, 164, 167, 168 salvation, 20, 24, 27, 38, 42, 88, 94, 95, 95, 100, 105, 112, 113, 158, 160 being-towards-salvation, 107 sanctity, 76 Santiago theory of cognition, 46 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 99 No Exit, 99 Satan, 2, 28, 29, 84, 155 satires, 23 satirical reminder, 38 satori, 12 Saul, Jon Ralston, 18 The Unconscious Civilization, 18 Schiller, Friedrich, xii, 17, 37 schizophrenia, 57 Scholasticism, 97 Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), 51 The Scream (Munch), 57, 58 screening tools, 121 secularism, 111

213 seen, the, 89 self, xi–xiv, 1, 12, 18, 19, 66, 71, 80, 81, 84, 90, 94, 98, 99, 108, 111, 115, 125, 134, 136–139, 141, 145, 153, 154, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167. See also ego central-s., xii, 3, 71–73, 83, 86, 141, 146, 166 environmental-s., 2, 91, 92, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113, 141, 147–149, 165, 166 interior s., 92, 106 lost s., 43 metaphysical s., 112 social-s., 3, 73, 74, 82, 83, 92, 106– 108, 141, 145, 146, 148, 149, 165 spatial s., 168 spiritual s., 26, 93 self-centeredness, 82, 164, 165 self-condemnation, 139 self-consciousness, 71, 94. See also consciousness self-esteem, 116, 148, 159 self-expression, God’s, 94 self-forgetfulness, 139 self-image, 2, 122, 124, 147 self-importance, 139 selfishness, 1, 84, 139, 140, 164 uns., 124, 125 self-justification, 139 selfless way of life, 9 selflessness, 139 self-organization, 46 self-pity, 126, 139 Self-Portrait (Munch), 57 sensations, 141 senses, 61, 66, 67, 84 sensibilit(ies)(y), 23, 24, 41, 42, 45, 52, 66 sentimentality, 12 Serenity prayer, 142, 143 serf(s), 23, 27 service, 125, 127, 135 s. of the sacred, 39 social s., 16 sexual drives, 61

214


Shakespeare, William, 8, 33 shamatha (tranquil abiding), 75 shame, 133, 142, 163 shape, 42, 80, 81 dream-s., 61 modern s., 62 s. of personhood, 85 sharing, 9, 124 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19 Shestov, Lev, 26 sick, the, 15, 16 sickness, 18 Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), 138, 165 Siegel, Shepard, 147 Silkworth, William Duncan, 143 sin(ners), 21, 87, 101–103, 141, 154, 157, 158 dependency as s., 117 original s., 10, 16, 21 singleness of purpose, 24 Sisyphus, 42 skills (coping, language, social), 83, 107, 142, 159 slaughter, 39, 156, 157 slavery, 24 sloth, 139, 141 Smith, Bob, 123, 131, 132, 134, 135 Smith, Huston, 9, 11, 21 Sobell, Linda C., 119 Sobell, Mark B., 119 sobriety, 118, 131–134, 140 social agendas, 2 society, xi–xiii, 31, 41, 107, 127, 145, 163 Christian s., 111 European s., 18, 32, 35 German s., 38 loving s., 111 Russian s., 17, 23, 25 s.-at-large, 146 Western corporatist, 18 socio-political orientation, 153 Socrates, 53 Sologub, Fedor, 19, 24 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 17 Cancer Ward, 17

Songs and Dances of Death (Mussorgsky), 27 sorrow(s), xiii, 23, 83, 108, 137, 145, 151, 156 soul(s), 16, 19, 26, 63, 67, 80, 81, 85, 102, 105, 126, 163, 166 s.-destroying time, 42 immortality of s., 43 s.-making, 104, 112, 158 Soviet novel, 20 spirit (pneuma, ruah, spiritus), 8, 12, 22, 23, 26, 34, 47, 75, 84, 85, 89, 100, 101, 143, 151, 166 Holy S., 15, 93–95, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106–108, 112, 141, 154 spiritual bankruptcy, 31, 34 spiritual battle, 38 Spiritual Care (Taylor), 90 spiritual tendency, xiii, 1–3, 73, 75, 76, 84–86, 88–91, 101, 111, 115, 135, 137, 139, 141, 144, 149, 154, 161–164 spiritual traditions, 47 spiritual weld(er)(ing), 3, 87, 91, 122, 123, 149 Stace, Walter Terence, 66 Stalin, Joseph, 20 Stanley, David , 102 Stasov, Vladimir, 28 Steindl-Rast, David, 104 stimulant(s), 122 The Stranger (Camus), 41 structure, 2, 46, 65 s. of brain/mind, 46, 84, 99 cosmic s., 7 fugue-like s., 32 genetic s., 75 ideological supers., 16 metaphysical s. of human death, 81 novelistic s., 19 s. vs. process, 71, 96, 161 of self/”I,” 71, 72, 105, 141 struggle(s), 26, 42, 91, 103, 128, 137, 146, 158, 159, 164 subconscious, 61

Index subjectivity, 87, 96, 115, 126, 132, 135, 144, 153 substance (essence), 8, 80, 95, 97 rational s., 98 substance abuse, 82, 83, 115–123, 125, 126, 131, 132, 134, 136–138, 140, 142–147, 149, 159 suffering, 1, 8, 10, 23, 24, 27–29, 31, 42, 45, 49, 62, 87, 91, 101, 102, 106, 135–137, 140, 142, 155, 156, 158, 160, 162, 165 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 97 The Sun (Munch), 58 Sunless (Golenishchev-Kutuzov), 27, 29 surrender, 124 s. to God’s will, 125, 143, 152 intellectual s., 53 susceptibility, 65 suspicion, 139 Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, 12 symbol(ism)(ists)(s), 31, 75, 86, 102 archetypal s., 62 cultural s., 61 left-brain s., 75 numinous s., 62 s. poetry/art, 19, 20 religious s., xiii, 1, 88, 102, 162 Russian s., 19, 20 sympathy, 53 synderesis, 109, 115 synthesis, 3, 164 The Tao of Physics (Capra), 45, 47 Taoism, 137, 168 Taylor, Elizabeth J., 90 Spiritual Care, 90 teaching(s), 15, 16, 108, 111, 112, 145, 154, 158, 159 natural law t., 109 technocrats, 18 technology, xi, 1, 9, 72, 79, 134, 135, 147, 159 ancient vs. modern t., 79, 110 Tekel, Rose, xiv Ten Commandments, 88

215 theolog(ians)(y), 2, 4, 12, 74, 77, 78, 93, 99, 100, 142, 154 theologia naturalis, 62 A Theological Word Book of the Bible (Richardson), 157 Therapeutic Touch (T.T.), 16, 17 therapy, 2, 156 aromatherapy, 1, 162 aversive t., 118 mental t., 62 psychotherapy, 133, 143 touch t., 74, 89 thing-in-itself, 74, 79 thinking, 45, 48, 76, 99, 151 Christian t., 16 rational t., 87 systems t., 46 theoretical t., 52 t. thing, 73, 78 Third Reich, 38 Thomas Aquinas, St., 73, 77, 79–81, 93– 95, 97, 98, 100, 104, 106, 109, 111, 112, 115, 154, 155 Summa Theologica, 97 Thomistic Agent, 73, 84 Thomistic concept(s), 79 thought(s), xi, xii, 3, 11, 73, 75, 79, 80, 83, 124, 135 t. of addictive behavior, 132 conscious t., 125 intuitive t., 45 nihilist potential of t., 42 scientific t., 51–53 thoughtfulness, 139 thrill seeking, 116 time, 155, 159, 160, 167 timelessness , 65 Time of Need (Barrett), 18 The Tin Drum (Grass), 17, 37, 49 tolerance to drugs/alcohol, 119, 131, 147 tolerance, interpersonal, 111, 112, 139, 166 Tolstoy, Leo, 152 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 152 totalitarian regime, 38 touch therapy, 74, 89

216


traged(ies)(y), 11, 142, 164 creative t., 27 tranquility, 58 transcenden(ce)(t), 12, 67, 90, 100, 101, 136, 149 self-t., 101 transgressions, 156 treatment, 116, 121–123, 140 alcohol t., 143 t. entry, 131, 145 menthadone t., 129 t. models, xiii residential t. programs, 121 successful t., 149 Treblinka, 38 tree metaphor, 77–80 “Trepak” (Mussorgsky), 27 Trilling, Lionel, 17 Trinity, the, 16, 93–99, 101, 103, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 137, 139, 154 trust, 8, 103, 136, 138, 139, 141, 143, 152, 153, 155, 160 truth(s), 8, 41, 62, 65, 77, 78, 80, 103, 111, 124 divine t., 124 religious t., 51 spiritual t., 83 subjective vs. objective t., 88, 89, 125, 126, 131–137, 144, 145, 152–155, 161, 167 Turgenev, Ivan, 17, 24 “Notes of a Hunter,” 17, 24 Turner, David, 9 Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (A.A.), 127 12-step program(s) (twelve), 83, 116, 122–124, 126, 127, 129, 133, 134, 137, 138, 143, 145, 149 tyranny, 26 political t., 25 tsarist t., 17 Tzu, Lao, 66

unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), 77– 79, 153 unconscious, xii, 61–63, 87 spiritual u., 88 The Unconscious Civilization (Saul), 18 understanding, 34, 66, 67, 74, 93, 97, 98, 106, 144, 154, 157, 161, 163 unit(y) (disunity), xi, xiii, 1, 9, 53, 75, 80, 84, 86, 90, 100, 101, 109, 113, 115, 116, 122, 127 biological u., 123, 134, 149 u. of creation, 87 family u., 37 of God/Trinity, 94–98, 110–112 infinitesimal/inseparable u., 61, 73, 74 mind-body u., 4, 75, 81, 101, 123, 149 spiritual u., 99, 161 transcendent u., 100, 102 universe, xi–xiii, 7, 8, 13, 17, 18, 21, 28, 34, 39, 42, 43, 46–48, 53, 54, 58, 62, 65, 82, 84, 89, 105, 106, 135 utilitarianism, 127 value(s), 23, 26, 32, 34, 75, 77–79, 82, 89, 90, 92, 101, 111, 121, 127, 148, 157, 162, 164 The Vampire (Munch), 57 VanDeMark, N. 83 Varela, Francisco J., 46 The Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 124 vengeance, 21, 157, 158, 163 Verses on a Beautiful Lady (Blok), 24 victim(ization)(s), 83, 137, 155, 156, 158, 162, 164 holocaust v., 54 vigilance, 124 violence, 2, 4, 15, 84, 163, 164 domestic v., 164 virtue(s), 93, 94, 97, 98, 104, 107, 111, 113, 163 knotic v., 23

217

Index vision, xiii, 20, 32, 34, 37, 42, 47, 51, 53, 63, 65, 66, 76, 86, 94, 101, 111, 112, 127, 166 beatific v., 98 scientific v., 46, 80 visualization, 98 war, 4, 62, 82, 163, 164 WWI, 53, 54 WW II, 17, 31, 32, 38, 48 “The Wasteland” (Eliot), 31–35 water, cleansing/holy, 87 We (Zamyatin), 20 weakness(es), 88, 136, 141, 145 The Web of Life (Capra), 45, 47 well-being, 41, 140 West Germany, post-World War II, 17 White, Lynn, 109 Whitehead, Alfred North, 5 Science and the Modern World, 51 Who Caused the Big Bang? (Edwards), 154 Wiesel, Elie, 10 Wild, John Daniel, 91, 100, 101, 113 will (God’s or human beings’), 21, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 106, 124–126, 135, 137, 141, 143, 151, 152, 154, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164 free-w., 10, 103, 135, 158 self-w. vs. God’s w., 139 weakened w. of alcoholic, 118

willingness, 132, 134, 137, 143, 146, 147, 153 Wilson, Bill, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 143, 144, 146 wisdom, 8, 35, 48, 53, 54, 86, 94, 134, 141–143, 154 Witch, Black (die Schwarze Köchin), 39 witches’ Sabbath, 28, 29 withdrawal, 119, 122 women, 9, 10, 21, 33, 57, 107, 131, 132, 138, 159, 164 Word, the (Logos), 95, 100, 104, 106, 107, 112 World Health Organization, 129 Yeats, William Butler, 35 Zamyatin, Evgeny Ivanovich, 20 We, 20 Zionism, 54 zoroastrianism, 10 Zurich University, 52


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72. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Editors, Postmodernism and the Holocaust. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 73. Peter A. Redpath, Masquerade of the Dream Walkers: Prophetic Theology from the Cartesians to Hegel. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 74. Malcolm D. Evans, Whitehead and Philosophy of Education: The Seamless Coat of Learning. A volume in Philosophy of Education 75. Warren E. Steinkraus, Taking Religious Claims Seriously: A Philosophy of Religion, Edited by Michael H. Mitias. A volume in Universal Justice 76.

Thomas Magnell, Editor, Values and Education

77. Kenneth A. Bryson, Persons and Immortality. A volume in Natural Law Studies 78. Steven V. Hicks, International Law and the Possibility of a Just World Order: An Essay on Hegel’s Universalism. A volume in Universal Justice 79. E. F. Kaelin, Texts on Texts and Textuality: A Phenomenology of Literary Art, Edited by Ellen J. Burns 80. Amihud Gilead, Saving Possibilities: A Study in Philosophical Psychology. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 81. André Mineau, The Making of the Holocaust: Ideology and Ethics in the Systems Perspective. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

82. Howard P. Kainz, Politically Incorrect Dialogues: Topics Not Discussed in Polite Circles 83. Veikko Launis, Juhani Pietarinen, and Juha Räikkä, Editors, Genes and Morality: New Essays. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 84. Steven Schroeder, The Metaphysics of Cooperation: A Study of F. D. Maurice 85. Caroline Joan (“Kay”) S. Picart, Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche: Eroticism, Death, Music, and Laughter. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 86. G. John M. Abbarno, Editor, The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives 87. James Giles, Editor, French Existentialism: Consciousness, Ethics, and Relations with Others. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 88. Deane Curtin and Robert Litke, Editors, Institutional Violence. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 89. Yuval Lurie, Cultural Beings: Reading the Philosophers of Genesis 90. Sandra A. Wawrytko, Editor, The Problem of Evil: An Intercultural Exploration. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 91. Gary J. Acquaviva, Values, Violence, and Our Future. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 92.

Michael R. Rhodes, Coercion: A Nonevaluative Approach

93. Jacques Kriel, Matter, Mind, and Medicine: Transforming the Clinical Method 94. Haim Gordon, Dwelling Poetically: Educational Challenges in Heidegger’s Thinking on Poetry. A volume in Philosophy of Education

95. Ludwig Grünberg, The Mystery of Values: Studies in Axiology, Edited by Cornelia Grünberg and Laura Grünberg 96. Gerhold K. Becker, Editor, The Moral Status of Persons: Perspectives on Bioethics. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 97. Roxanne Claire Farrar, Sartrean Dialectics: A Method for Critical Discourse on Aesthetic Experience 98. Ugo Spirito, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Translated from Italian and Edited by Anthony G. Costantini. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 99. Steven Schroeder, Between Freedom and Necessity: An Essay on the Place of Value 100. Foster N. Walker, Enjoyment and the Activity of Mind: Dialogues on Whitehead and Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 101. Avi Sagi, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Existence: The Voyage of the Self. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein 102. Bennie R. Crockett, Jr., Editor, Addresses of the Mississippi Philosophical Association. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 103. Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology: The Philosophical Contribution of Günther Anders 104. Giambattista Vico, Universal Right. Translated from Latin and edited by Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 105. Judith Presler and Sally J. Scholz, Editors, Peacemaking: Lessons from the Past, Visions for the Future. A volume in Philosophy of Peace

106. Dennis Bonnette, Origin of the Human Species. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 107. Phyllis Chiasson, Peirce’s Pragmatism: The Design for Thinking. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 108. Dan Stone, Editor, Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 109. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, What Is the Meaning of Human Life? 110. Lennart Nordenfelt, Health, Science, and Ordinary Language, with Contributions by George Khushf and K. W. M. Fulford 111. Daryl Koehn, Local Insights, Global Ethics for Business. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 112. Matti Häyry and Tuija Takala, Editors, The Future of Value Inquiry. A volume in Nordic Value Studies 113.

Conrad P. Pritscher, Quantum Learning: Beyond Duality

114. Thomas M. Dicken and Rem B. Edwards, Dialogues on Values and Centers of Value: Old Friends, New Thoughts. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 115. Rem B. Edwards, What Caused the Big Bang? A volume in Philosophy and Religion 116. Jon Mills, Editor, A Pedagogy of Becoming. A volume in Philosophy of Education 117. Robert T. Radford, Cicero: A Study in the Origins of Republican Philosophy. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 118. Arleen L. F. Salles and María Julia Bertomeu, Editors, Bioethics: Latin American Perspectives. A volume in Philosophy in Latin America

119. Nicola Abbagnano, The Human Project: The Year 2000, with an Interview by Guiseppe Grieco. Translated from Italian by Bruno Martini and Nino Langiulli. Edited with an introduction by Nino Langiulli. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 120. Daniel M. Haybron, Editor, Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil. A volume in Personalist Studies 121. Anna T. Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub: A Modern Sufi Odyssey 122. George David Miller, Peace, Value, and Wisdom: The Educational Philosophy of Daisaku Ikeda. A volume in Daisaku Ikeda Studies 123. Haim Gordon and Rivca Gordon, Sophistry and Twentieth-Century Art 124. Thomas O. Buford and Harold H. Oliver, Editors Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Critics. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 125. Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein 126. Robert S. Hartman, The Knowledge of Good: Critique of Axiological Reason. Expanded translation from the Spanish by Robert S. Hartman. Edited by Arthur R. Ellis and Rem B. Edwards.A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 127. Alison Bailey and Paula J. Smithka, Editors. Community, Diversity, and Difference: Implications for Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 128. Oscar Vilarroya, The Dissolution of Mind: A Fable of How Experience Gives Rise to Cognition. A volume in Cognitive Science 129. Paul Custodio Bube and Jeffery Geller, Editors, Conversations with Pragmatism: A Multi-Disciplinary Study. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values

130. Richard Rumana, Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 131. Stephen Schneck, Editor, Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives A volume in Personalist Studies 132. Michael Kazanjian, Learning Values Lifelong: From Inert Ideas to Wholes. A volume in Philosophy of Education 133. Rudolph Alexander Kofi Cain, Alain Leroy Locke: Race, Culture, and the Education of African American Adults. A volume in African American Philosophy 134. Werner Krieglstein, Compassion: A New Philosophy of the Other 135. Robert N. Fisher, Daniel T. Primozic, Peter A. Day, and Joel A. Thompson, Editors, Suffering, Death, and Identity. A volume in Personalist Studies 136. Steven Schroeder, Touching Philosophy, Sounding Religion, Placing Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 137. Guy DeBrock, Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 138. Lennart Nordenfelt and Per-Erik Liss, Editors, Dimensions of Health and Health Promotion 139. Amihud Gilead, Singularity and Other Possibilities: Panenmentalist Novelties 140. Samantha Mei-che Pang, Nursing Ethics in Modern China: Conflicting Values and Competing Role Requirements. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 141. Christine M. Koggel, Allannah Furlong, and Charles Levin, Editors, Confidential Relationships: Psychoanalytic, Ethical, and Legal Contexts. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology

142. Peter A. Redpath, Editor, A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Étienne Gilson. A volume in Gilson Studies 143. Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell, Editors, Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 144. Matti Häyry and Tuija Takala, Editors, Scratching the Surface of Bioethics. A volume in Values in Bioethics 145. Leonidas Donskis, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature 146. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Editor, Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz 147. Herman Stark, A Fierce Little Tragedy: Thought, Passion, and SelfFormation in the Philosophy Classroom. A volume in Philosophy of Education 148. William Gay and Tatiana Alekseeva, Editors, Democracy and the Quest for Justice: Russian and American Perspectives. A volume in Contemporary Russian Philosophy 149. Xunwu Chen, Being and Authenticity 150. Hugh P. McDonald, Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values 151. Dane R. Gordon and David C. Durst, Editors, Civil Society in Southeast Europe. A volume in Post-Communist European Thought 152. John Ryder and Emil Višňovský, Editors, Pragmatism and Values: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 153. Messay Kebede, Africa’s Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization

154. Steven M. Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 155. Albert A. Anderson, Steven V. Hicks, and Lech Witkowski, Editors, Mythos and Logos: How to Regain the Love of Wisdom. A volume in Universal Justice 156. John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, Editors, Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 157. Javier Muguerza, Ethics and Perplexity: Toward a Critique of Dialogical Reason. Translated from the Spanish by Jody L. Doran. Edited by John R. Welch. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 158. Gregory F. Mellema, The Expectations of Morality 159. Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins 160. Stan van Hooft, Life, Death, and Subjectivity: Moral Sources in Bioethics A volume in Values in Bioethics 161. André Mineau, Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity 162. Arthur Efron, Expriencing Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Deweyan Account. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 163. Reyes Mate, Memory of the West: The Contemporaneity of Forgotten Jewish Thinkers. Translated from the Spanish by Anne Day Dewey. Edited by John R. Welch. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 164. Nancy Nyquist Potter, Editor, Putting Peace into Practice: Evaluating Policy on Local and Global Levels. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 165. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, and Peter Herissone-Kelly, Editors, Bioethics and Social Reality. A volume in Values in Bioethics

166. Maureen Sie, Justifying Blame: Why Free Will Matters and Why it Does Not. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 167. Leszek Koczanowicz and Beth J. Singer, Editors, Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 168. Michael W. Riley, Plato’s Cratylus: Argument, Form, and Structure. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 169. Leon Pomeroy, The New Science of Axiological Psychology. Edited by Rem B. Edwards. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 170. Eric Wolf Fried, Inwardness and Morality 171. Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defense. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 172. Charles C. Hinkley II, Moral Conflicts of Organ Retrieval: A Case for Constructive Pluralism. A volume in Values in Bioethics 173. Gábor Forrai and George Kampis, Editors, Intentionality: Past and Future. A volume in Cognitive Science 174. Dixie Lee Harris, Encounters in My Travels: Thoughts Along the Way. A volume in Lived Values:Valued Lives 175. Lynda Burns, Editor, Feminist Alliances. A volume in Philosophy and Women 176. George Allan and Malcolm D. Evans, A Different Three Rs for Education. A volume in Philosophy of Education 177. Robert A. Delfino, Editor, What are We to Understand Gracia to Mean?: Realist Challenges to Metaphysical Neutralism. A volume in Gilson Studies 178. Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson, The Curve of the Sacred: An Exploration of Human Spirituality. A volume in Philosophy and Religion

The Curve of the Sacred: An Exploration of Human Spirituality

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The Study of Spirituality

The Essentials of Spirituality

Exploration of the Seas

Symbolic Structures: An Exploration of the Culture of the Dowayos

Exploration of the Seas

The Ottoman Age of Exploration

Scientific Opportunities in the Human Exploration of Space

The Sacred And The Profane: An Investigation Of Hipsters

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

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The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

In Search of the Sacred

The Sacred Art of Stealing

Sacred Knight of the Veil

The Sacred Depths of Nature

In Search of the Sacred

Quest of the Sacred Slipper

The Invention of Sacred Tradition

Exploration in the World of the Ancients

Mass Customization: An Exploration of European Characteristics

Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children

Society, Spirituality, and the Sacred: A Social Scientific Introduction

An Astrobiology Strategy for the Exploration of Mars

The English verb : an exploration of structure and meaning

An Astrobiology Strategy for the Exploration of Mars

Korean Spirituality (Dimensions of Asian Spirituality)

Under the Blue Curve

The Curve Shortening Problem

The Cheating Curve

The Curve of the Sacred: An Exploration of Human Spirituality

An exploration of chaos

The Study of Spirituality

The Essentials of Spirituality

Exploration of the Seas

Symbolic Structures: An Exploration of the Culture of the Dowayos

Exploration of the Seas

The Ottoman Age of Exploration

Scientific Opportunities in the Human Exploration of Space

The Sacred And The Profane: An Investigation Of Hipsters

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

In Search of the Sacred

The Sacred Art of Stealing

Sacred Knight of the Veil

The Sacred Depths of Nature

In Search of the Sacred

Quest of the Sacred Slipper

The Invention of Sacred Tradition

Exploration in the World of the Ancients

Mass Customization: An Exploration of European Characteristics

Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children

Society, Spirituality, and the Sacred: A Social Scientific Introduction

An Astrobiology Strategy for the Exploration of Mars

The English verb : an exploration of structure and meaning

An Astrobiology Strategy for the Exploration of Mars

Korean Spirituality (Dimensions of Asian Spirituality)

Under the Blue Curve

The Curve Shortening Problem

The Cheating Curve

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