The Radical Truth in a Noble Lie
 |
The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, c. 1509-1511, Vatican City, Rome, Italy |
By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)
Introduction
Humanity has a very limited capacity to understand. This was one of the fundamental realities that created the Golden Age of Philosophy, revealed in the foundational works of Plato and Aristotle before the advent of Christ, and informing much of the development of the Christian Tradition. This simple reality is why we still see the essential image of divinity in the naked human body, because it is the most familiar of all images, the one we see in the mirror, that we associated with the power and mystery that we worship. This is also why clothes are the measure of civilization and theological truth - because what is glorified is also hidden, lest it be made manifest, scorned or discarded. The more clothed a people are, the more “othered” their self concept becomes, and the more exulted and god-like they psychologically become - all without even realizing it!
 |
| The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci, Showing the Perfect Proportions of Man, Which Overlap with the Proportions of the Solar System and Reflect the Order of the External Cosmos |
 |
| The Naked Christ Exulted and Glorified Upon the Cross is the Center of the Christian Mythos and Iconography, Reflecting the Order and Harmony of the Internal, Psychological Cosmos |
Mirrors of Perception and Physical Symbols
Symbols of the body, and their abstractions, hold physical power over us because we deeply empathize with them (our brains are unable to tell what is ours and what is someone else's, accepting rubber hands or feet, relieving phantom pain by extending "ownership" to reflections, and addicting us to voyeristic and identity confusing behavior in the viewing of pornography). “Mirror neurons” are a whole category of sensation-producing neurons in the brain that profoundly control our nervous system and pain receptors, and that provably associate internal feelings with external symbols of the body, be they are own limbs, the bodies of others, or pictures. Christ tells us the psychological truth that what we think and what we do are united, and that lusting after someone in our heart is the same as adultery (Matthew 5:28). The brain cannot tell the difference between our internal, projected image and the external, real world, ultimately perceiving one contiguous experiential reality. We are biologically programmed to embody, to attach our feelings to biological symbols, which are our own body parts. Therefore, we find Egyptian phallus wands, used to express power in ancient paganism and fertility practices, replaced with the handheld Cross, which still keeps its "fountain of life" and "eternally standing and conquering" cultural poetry in a powerful divinized icon of human fertility. We find portals and orbs, wombs of water, and faces - a lot of faces - everywhere within our historical holy spaces! These face expresses comprehensible existence better than anything else! We are searching for pictures of God that are not idols, but mirrors into the soul. Only when we find icons of man's potential, our unreal selves - big eyes, small lips, and golden halos - can we be our true selves. Our own bodies are Platonic Caves of sorts.
 |
| The Stylized Aesthetic of Byzantine Iconography Show a Glorified Humanity in which the Human Passions No Longer Shadow the Countenance, and the Other Human Senses are Smaller in Proportion to Sight |
 |
| Humans Innately Confuse the Bodies of Those They Observe with Their Own, Literally Feeling Pain or Exerting Sympathetic Movement with Images of Others that They See. The Same Mirror Neuron Activity is Seen in Many Other Animals, Not Just Within Monkeys and Apes |
"..the earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth...While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious—but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though, for the most part, you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian." - The Noble Lie of Plato's Republic, Book 3:414-15
Historically, we can see that all popular religions dissolve into a "Noble Lie" at the point of popular reception and practice, departing from the individual philosophical search for truth and experience with the transcendent, and becoming a system whereby groups of people conform their behavior for the good of maintaining and serving a cultural hierarchy. With many cultures' commitment to communal identity up and against individuality, sometimes questions leading to individual thought and freedom are simply not allowed to be asked, and the possibility of a subjective experience of objective truth is sometimes never considered. This can be seen in the trends of Imperial Christianity with the formation and hardening of a clerical class, excluding the average believer from core functions within the Church, creating a monastic ecclesial elite class, and piling on multiple requirements for affiliation that both loosen the requirements of ritual purity and also adding higher expectations of financial support and loyalty to group identity. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it is necessary in order for all cultures to function. The smarter elements of a society filter upwards into management, while those without the capacity to understand and discern the patterns of the Noble Lie fit well into the lower rungs of the social order to carry out the necessary functions of maintaining the mundane social order. Christianity is no different in this regard to any other socially stabilizing religion, like Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam.
The Word of God and the Image of Man
Just as we see in the Allegory of the Cave, in the seventh chapter of the Republic, we learn how Socrates told his students about a theoretical world in which people can only see shadows and are unfamiliar with reality, and about the difficulties and setbacks of setting them free from their shackles to be coached into eventually walking into the sunlight and the outside word. In the same way, we realize that we carry this cave around with us constantly. We cannot escape from the "cave of our mind" which projects our own feelings and perceptions upon our memory as a false version of reality. We cannot help the fact that our perceptions of the world and of God are only shadows, but this does not mean that the world is not existent or that there is no God, only that we cannot mistake what we can know and identify with as God Himself. God's essence, His existence, gets confused with these shadowy symbols that we inherit from our cultures, and these symbols become substitutes for reality, exerting power on their own, creating a whole system of dependencies and historical causalities, which impart them with de facto shakti and personal qi. These perceptions are lies that cannot begin to define God, and so we must use them to approach the truth of the situation, while remembering that they are lies and half-truths.
 |
| The Analogy of the Cave in Plato's Republic, Showing How False Images are Projected within Culture to Control the Minds of Those Captive to It |
This is what St. Paul has identified in his vision of a heavenly and deified Christ, which allows Christ to be "all things to all people," functioning as an icon of the absolute in the mind of each person, disconnected from historical or literal context. Instead of the Jewish "political messiah," Christ is the power of resurrection, the power of renewal, instead of ritual purity or literal scriptural interpretation as the Law, the proverbial "Word of God," as it was within the Jewish context. This radical break from the expectations and categories of Judaism cannot be lost to us today. Many aspects of First Century Judaism have changed, and various scholars point towards the "Two Powers in Heaven," the "Ascended Enoch," and even the Metatron Myth, in order to make the Christian theological differences mesh with some aspect of a pre-Orthodox Jewish expectation. But, the fact was that the vast majority of Jews did not recognize Christ as the Messiah, and it is also incontrovertible that it was the pagan Greek world, a further development of the Alexandrian Jewish idea of the Logos and the Greek cultural aesthetic of embodiment and perfection, that saw Christ as a cultural fulfillment and a metaphysical necessity. The centrality of the glorified Christ as the Icon of the Father, the visible representation of the Godhead ("the Godhead bodily"), beyond questions of space, time and historical context is intentional and essential for us to understand the power of the Christian Faith as a movement. If Christ is unbound from Jewish expectations, then He is unbound by the constraints of their narrative, a limited narrative with boundaries that cannot be crossed by the believer, whose sole goal becomes then to embody this idealized and transcendental Christ, this Christ of the Heavenly Form.
 |
| The Process of Knowledge According to Plato's Republic |
 |
| How Man Processes Information and Relates to Idea from the Platonic Tradition |
The Christian development of the Incarnation contradicts the whole history of the Jewish people, but not its intent for repentance and return to God, but instead of keeping the Law to make one's life conform to God's will, now it is to become physically one with God through the Sacraments and living out a life in conformity to the Life of God. In this way, Christianity was prefigured in Judaism, but on an allegorical level, but not truthfully a faithful continuity of the Jewish Tradition as the Jews themselves understood it. In response to this reality, modern intellectuals find Christianity to be fraudulent and deceitful, political rather than philosophical. Schuon and Aslan both became Muslim after encountering this central accusation after discovering historical contradictions. The "Glorified Christ" is not just historical, and if history defines truth, then the best thing is opt for a Prophet, rather than a Savior. Or, as Chesterton, Lewis, Schmemman, and the Perennialist thinking behind Fr. Seraphim Rose and D.B. Hart’s approaches find, the Christian Tradition is an esoteric and contradictory proposition that finds life and ability to explain the human mind and create a culture of human flourishing because it is founded on an incomprehensible myth, a myth that gives us a vision of a Relative Absolute that can only inhabit our imaginations and enliven our culture as we work together to create it! Thus, we become a body in proportion to our combined contemplation of the Heavenly Christ, and only embody this ideal when we are all equally given over to it as a lived concept.
The Noble Lie of Christianity
We all create God in our own image. This is an illusion. To live without this realization is to worship idols.
You get out of religion what you bring into it. Religion has no innate power. We experience in proportion to the measure we invest into the disciplines and practices of the Tradition.
If enough people believe it, then it becomes real to those people and exerts a physically perceivable power.
Therefore, histories and myths change to accommodate our identity, but the power perceived in these systems is real and forms civilizations.
Stripping away our false, projected, social selves and returning in humility to what we truly are is the Prophetic Voice, the uncompromising, uncomfortable call to return to the Unknown.
In accepting Christ as the Image of the Father, we accept that we are made in the Image of Christ, and this allows us to practice that everyone else is made in the same Image, presencing God to us.
In practicing that everyone else presents God to us, we can act and respond to people in a truly godly way, a way the fills the culture with a supernatural goodness that is not otherwise possible or present.
This heightened culture of altruistic goodness then transforms our lives, our communities, and the world into better, more safe, more human spaces where otherwise impossible kindness is manifest.
This Christian culture can help those in need, regulate the actions of its members, and benefit the lives of those outside of its borders without assuming its own superiority, which would create its own downfall in pride, lust of power, and greed for resources, constantly repenting as individuals and as a group, and then incorporating more people into its ever-expanding mission.
God can be truly experienced on His terms, but because He is ultimately unknowable and transcendent, He sets the terms and situations and all such experiences are unique, individualized, transformative, healing and rare. They cannot be forced or sought. They only occur when one is completely absorbed in the system that the communal and personal spiritual practices create.
Summary
The only question left unanswered by this profound and potentially disturbing story is not "what is truth", but "what is salvation?" Or, "how, as a response to a noble lie, can salvation be found as a reflection and outworking of ultimate truth in human life?" Is it "relationship" or better yet, "dialogue?" Are those who believe a lie "deceived," or are they better able to reach their full, human potential, and are thereby happy and blessed to believe what is not altogether "fact," seeing that "facts" are an artificial category that we give to knowledge, which is ultimately based on our perception and mind. If this is the case, the pursuit of facts is almost an unattainable mirage, since we are never able to obtain an objective reality, the realm of "facts," that are any different than other categorization of human thought. All knowledge is ultimately intuition, dependent upon faith, evidence that our minds meet reality in a fundamental way, and all religions are the worship of that which fundamentally cannot be "known" as we know anything else, effectively an "Other" created in the mind of the worshipper, intuitively reflecting the ontology of the good we experience in human life.
 |
| The Risen, Glorified, Ascended Christ is Paradoxically a Man, a Historical Reality, an Timeless Idea, and Also an Eternal Unknowable Abstraction |
The difference between Christ and the myriad of other symbols that could represent an unknowable God is that Christ is exactly what we need as humans to interact with the unknowable. This is the whole idea behind the Incarnation, as incompatible as it is with historical Judaism and the logic of Islam, and as influenced by Greek philosophy and Hindu cultural categories as it historically is. It is not a pure ideological lineage, but a mixture of cultures and influences, all leading to a vision of a Divine Man who represents God in fullness while maintaining an ontological, relatable, grounded being and speaking our language, which is our human body. Christ undermines our lowest impulses and calls us to our highest possible selves, fills our selfish needs with a consideration of the other, and works out our psychological problems in a way that enables us to create stable civilizations and protect the weakest in our societies. His only throne was a Cross, His only empire was of the disempowered, uneducated and common man, and His calling to us was the same as it was two thousand years ago - “pick up your cross and follow me!” This upside-down kingdom is the mystery that calls us to fulfill that which we can only know and be, our own feeble humanity!
And those who do so are promised an ahistorical glory that shines through the minds of all generations, in a memory eternal!
Comments
Post a Comment