Inexplicable religion

The Guardian has a Simon Blackburn review of Karen Armstrong's new book, In Defense of God. The book's thesis is that religion at its essence uses "devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music."

Armstrong evidently posits that the worst perversion that can happen to religion is intellectualizing it: "This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail."

So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the "apophatic" tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words...

The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression.

Blackburn disagrees, saying that silence is no more than the lowest common denominator, the mind idling - and that, "As David Hume put it, in human nature there is 'some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent.' So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance."

Silence is of course often the mind at idle, especially when it comes to intellectual endeavors. But isn't that Armstrong's point? That religion, despite Aquinas' labors, is in no way suited for intellectualism?

Religion as Entertainment

And entertainment as religion...

We all know how seriously entertainers and artists can take ourselves - and how amazingly seriously the public takes celebrities as well (all the while claiming not to...).

As someone who worked for the Catholic Church for 16 years, let me tell you that those guys also take themselves very seriously, and as far as I can tell, so do the Protestants, Muslims, etc. The only religious celebrity who doesn't take himself seriously seems to be the Dalai Lama.

Now we all know why religious leaders take themselves seriously - their raison d'etre being our very souls. Artists of every stripe who take themselves seriously often consider their vocation similarly. When you find yourself weeping to a piano sonata, isn't it because your soul has opened to recognize beauty and love? And isn't the same true when we read a novel that awakens us to feelings and thoughts we hadn't yet known, or a piece of art that reawakens our childlike thrill to beauty?

The connection between religion and entertainment is ancient. Here's one take:

I have this theory (in the prosaic, not scientific, sense of the word) that religion is what people did for entertainment before mass media. The history of theater (the tragedy né tragōidia, or "goat song") rising up from religious ritual suggests the same, and the development of theater into other dramatic forms like satire roughly corresponds with the decline of myth evolution in Greek culture...

We know the printing press, print being the advent of modern mass media, turned out rather badly for the Catholic Church, which found its traditional standing as interpreter of scripture (and, by extension, intermediary with God) demolished by the sudden easy availability of bibles to a hoi polloi quickly becoming educated enough to read them. Literacy was a cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation, but the Protestants pretty quickly discovered what the Catholic Church learned the hard way some 14 centuries earlier in the heyday of Gnosticism: when you let people do their own interpreting, they go off in all sorts of unexpected directions; soon you've got sects denouncing royalty as the usurpation of God's rightful place and condemnation of private property as sin. Mix all this in with literacy, a smidgen of disposable income and the printing press, and voila! The novel is born.

It's no coincidence that The Novel, as birthed in the era of the printing press, was denounced by churches of all stripes as roadmaps to the Devil, because certainly that's what they were, commemorating all manner of human vice and depredation; that's drama, baby! Churches also continued their longstanding feuds with theater and art, frequently condemned as idolatry, while simultaneously employing both, absolving them of their sins where they served religion's purposes.