On the Fear of Faith and Faith in Fear

The Emerald Tablet, a Philosophy of the Cosmos, a Primordial Guide to the Sciences, Supposedly Written by St. Enoch under the Egyptian Name of Hermes Trismegistus, by Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrvm Sapientiae Aeternae, AD 1609, Typ 620.09.482, Houghton Library, Harvard University

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven” - Matthew 6:10

By Cbp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

As I was reading the smug articles of an old friend, gone astray from the Christian Faith into the morass of the agnosticism and relativism that is “New Atheism,” I noticed that the traces of his own volition throughout his writing are the most relevant to his own questions about the validity of others’ beliefs. His argument that “faith gives the believer comfort, so it tenets obviously cannot be true, since they are held, not because they reflect reality, but because they allow the believer to avoid reality” reveals all. His doubt is echoed in every faith journey, and while sometimes he is sincere, his thought is so concentrated on removing what he wishes might be true that his secondary wish of finding truth must necessarily be obscured. He desires to blot out the possibility of self-deception by insisting that what he would like to be true about Christianity is merely wishful thinking, and therefore invalid because he would like to believe it. 

“Beliefs are invalidated, ipso facto, if one wants to believe them!”

My approach is diametrically opposite - I believe that we project our reality in a highly precise and selective way within our thought, based on the focus of our wills. If I could not see that I am clearly not God through the element of surprise, I would believe that no one else exists and that I am my own godhead (an amazingly secure position, but flawed in that I can not wish myself into being a billionaire or change my position within reality based merely upon my desires). Therefore, I see that I must not be God, but that God must be incredibly like me (only unlike me in ways that I wish I could change in me), and that the purpose of the universe is the same as art to man… totally based on an individual’s expression and self-knowledge. 

As always, we find that morality dictates our philosophy. I argue toward what I want to do, I do not merely follow where my arguments logically lead. This proves to me that our wills are actually the axis point where the real drama is unfolding.

I often have a dream of being able to fly, but only when I am firmly concentrating on flying and my eyes are tightly shut. I can then feel myself flying, but I dare not look down, for then my will is displaced by fear and my motion be replaced with entropy. And so I see the process of our reality, and our response to reality, through the lens of will and motion, and fear as the freezing of our minds against our will to live and against the will behind the universe to give us life. 

I would be much like my friend, well on my way to an atheistic nihilism or a Buddhist universalism, had it not been for my shock at finding myself morally deficient, and experiencing a great fear as a result of this deficiency - a fear that was rooted in realizing that my will was somehow broken. My conscience showed itself to be more real than any of my other senses - full of power, impossible to ignore, and able to exert terrible pain. The fear of this discovery filled me with existential dread, and pointed toward the existence of a God, hidden within the crevasses of my cracking psyche. I am well acquainted with fear, not only because I lived for nearly two decades in a country where fear is a fact of life, but because of several brushes with death I’ve had along the way. I cannot claim that I am fearless, but that I have faced my fears and survived to tell the tale. I know what horror feels like, and it cannot compete with the pains of a violated conscience. 

Many people have a problem with the thought of God allowing evil or creating a starving and HIV-ridden human existence. I don’t have this problem, perhaps because I have found that the biggest pain arises from internal fear… and fear clearly arises from our own internal contradiction between what we know to be right and what we want from the world, our broken and double-minded willing, not from God’s desire to torture us! Without appealing to theodicy, it is clear that a free world would be a world with self-inflicted and other-inflicted pain, but is also obvious that the degree of pain we experience has to do with the orientation of our wills in the first place - what we are expecting out of life. My wife, unafraid of childbirth because of her upraising in a Chinese village where it was seen as normal and bearable, bore eight children without whimpering or anesthetics. In contrast to the American women all around her, she was not afraid, and therefore did not perceive childbirth as being all that painful. This is one of the original precept behind Kung Fu and Bushido  – you win because, unlike your enemy, you are not afraid to die and therefore you can think in the midst of the fight while your opponent is responding in fight and flight. Not being afraid is a result of knowing what to expect, like biting your arm on purpose, which reduces pain to something manageable merely because you expect it. This is also why you can’t tickle yourself and laugh. It is the unexpected, un-embraced, seemingly random pain that hurts the most, like accidentally biting your tongue when eating some delicious food. Counterintuitively, when you accept that life is pain, you experience less pain! There is a complex mechanism of expectation, anticipation, reception and response/reaction that enables the same input to be perceived differently according to the order and direction of the steps taken within this internal process. With one, pain can be experienced as edifying discipline. With another, it is a life-dehabilitating experience that ends our ability to think or feel. 

Spies and adventurers know what it is to be afraid, as do television hosts and athletes, but they conquer this fear through willing themselves through the situation, clinging to hope, and practicing how to do things so many times that they can still do them when fear shuts down their capacity to think. All people handle fear by either willing against it or giving into it, and this is determined by how they see their part in the world and the course of events. 

If we are over-awed by the insignificance of man in the universe, we are most likely not to do anything, and to give up our hopes in the fear of being met with disappointment. I am struck by the fact that we are tiny specs of dust, clinging to an insignificant whirling orb, circling a small star on the fringes of a one-in-a-billion galaxy, makes some of my scientifically-minded friends gasp in awe and give up their metaphorical ghosts, losing all hope of Theism or hope in their spiritual lives. I think that they are too easily afraid. If such vastness makes them feel small and insignificant, so too should their massive size and complexity compared to the billions of other cellular life forms that make up their composite whole make them feel special and like a reflection of the universe itself. 

Man’s Ideas Pictured in a Reflective Process of Projection 

The Human Being is a Microcosm of the Macrocosm, Enlightened with the Presence of God 

Man’s Body Superimposed Upon the Created Universe, Showing How One Reflects the Other  

The Process of Extraction, Purification, Refining and Distilling is an Ancient Metaphor for Human Life and the Purpose of Suffering 

A 15th Century Illustration of Medieval Distillation 

An Alchemical Depiction of the Harmony of Man’s Ideas and the Platonic Forms, Holding Together an Armillary of Planets and a Garden of Earthly Delights 

A Medieval Manuscript Showing Man Uniting Heaven and Earth, Night and Day, Illustrating Both Created and Uncreated Principles 

The Restoration of Eden from a Perfect Submission of the Human Will to the Divine Will, Resulting in Universal Knowledge and Harmony 

Cosmology, in the Medieval sense, in the sense that the cosmos is finite and that man is at its center, then, is my answer to the questions of faith that surround us. We find ourselves smack-dab in the middle of an awful and inspiring scale of grandeur. We are nothing compared to the universe. We are the universe compared to atoms and molecules, which are nothing next to us. “As above, so below.” Like the mythic Emerald Tablet, we find ourselves to be the key to everything, and our thoughts, inspirations, cultures, and spiritual achievements to be real - because, in the great vastness of the void, they are something. They change the physical world, interact with a higher, metaphysical world, and refract the brilliant rays of uncreated light into a myriad of intuitions, insights, inspirations, creative expressions, art, music, poetry and divine conversation. 

People today instinctively despise such a worldview and scorn it because it is a programmed response of our secular religion; people laugh at such certainty and purpose within the course of events. They are, simply put, afraid of certainty and fearful of the powerful will exerted by those with such beliefs – the fundamentalist “fanatic” who upsets their smoothly-running, mechanistic, financially secure system. These are, as my sons put it, the “Karens” of the modern world. We are taught by these insufferable people to have faith in fear; that the fearful are the truthful, and that those who are not afraid are morally twisted. But the more we fear faith and have faith in fear, the less human we become, the less able to understand our ancestors, and the more captive by baser, simple pleasures that do little to actually give us faith, hope, love and life. To submit to fear is to resign to death. 

To rebel against this “Spirit of Karen” that has possessed the Western world, and decide to live another day, is a decision to have faith and believe in good, despite the overwhelming opposition. In an action tantamount to social suicide, one decides to live in opposition to this culture of death and fear. You plunge in the tanto of willful confidence, committing to the existence of God or the preferability of living a Christian life, and commit a kind of Postmodern Seppuku. To hold on to Faith, to believe in religion, sincerely, and to find hope for the human condition is more subversive in this contemporary setting than any hippie ever was in our past culture. Thus, I push through the mirror and see the world from the other side. I can see the light without the need of psychedelics. 

A 17th Century Illustration of the Philosopher’s Pathway Towards God, with Many Obstacles, Tortures and Difficulties 

The key, then, is to see myself as a reflection of the whole, as a mirror of God’s glory, as a universe in miniature. I am not the origin of my life. I will not control my destiny. All is in God’s hands, for good and for ill, and I must embrace it in all the pain that it will bring, knowing that I cannot escape it, that it is for my ultimate good, and that purification occurs by going through this process. Life, eternal, abundant, all-encompassing, rests through the keyhole. All I must do is turn! 

This process is profoundly reflected in the ancient aforementioned text, the “Emerald Tablet,” which was often mistaken as an alchemical manual throughout history, but is explained within the context of Christian doctrine by the Byzantine theologian, Michael Psellos. The origins of this text are unknown, appearing first in Syriac Aramaic and then in Arabic in the 6th and 7th centuries, and translated into Latin in the 10th century they exerted a huge influence upon Western philosophy and sciences during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Isaac Newton labored for many years over the text as a kind of universal key to knowledge. The text itself claims to be ancient, and many Renaissance scholars like Athanasius Kirscher believed it to be the lost “Book of Enoch” mentioned in the Bible. In his work “De Omnifaria Doctrina,” Psellos shows that the “alchemy” of this ancient text is simply a metaphor for the transformation of the Christian soul through the activity of the Holy Spirit, the “refining fire,” turning the “wood, hay and stubble” of the carnal man’s works into the precious and eternal “gold, silver and bronze” of the spiritual man’s saintly life. This interpretation is based upon St. Paul’s own teachings regarding the final judgment and mankind’s works holding a kind of ontological and eternal value in 1 Corinthians 13:12-13. It also complements my thinking above about the directionality of the will, expressed in faith, fear, and the choice of life. 

The text reads - 

“True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true. That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. And as all things were by contemplation of one, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of volition. The power thereof is perfect. If thy will be cast on to earth, it will separate the element of earth from that of fire, the subtle from the gross. With great sagacity it doth ascend gently from earth to Heaven. Again it doth descend to earth from Heaven, and uniteth in itself the force from things superior and things inferior. Thus thou wilt possess the glory of the brightness of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee. Thy will is the strong fortitude of all strength, for it overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance. Thus was this world created. Hence will there be marvellous changes achieved, of which the manner will follow this pattern.” (Hermes Trimegistus, translated by Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, 1928, and edited by the author) 

As my mind returns to my former friend’s essay and the implications of his fear of faith and his faith in fear, I realize how much his attitude reflects the zeitgeist of our age. We live in a world where this odd combination of contradictions is an unquestionable orthodoxy, and it mostly goes without articulation, which is its best form of defense. Self-doubt is the new virtue, but one which the Holy Spirit does not impart. It grows on a tree of self-worship, and hangs with other rotten fruit of things like “ethically-produced pornography,” “male feminism,” and the compulsory congratulation of “gender transitions.” All the new categories we create to do the wrong thing in the right way. We must tear down fake virtue memorials and burn our culture’s fake participation trophies and stop our fake virtue signaling. Hopefully, just in speaking the true identity of fake virtues out loud, showing that they are vices disguised as virtues, we will be able to see them for what they are in the future, and know how to better approach them, rooting them out of all the nooks and crannies that they still hide in, within our Postmodern souls. 

Maybe then we will be able to see that our desire for belief is one of the greatest evidences for the truth of our revealed Faith, because that very desire points to an origin in God?