The Lion, the Psychoanalyst, and Why It's All Relative

This particular blog was inspired by a particularly bad book that I recently picked up and read. Well, actually, I didn't read the whole thing. I'm not in the habit of tossing books aside unfinished, but in this case, it couldn't be avoided. I did slog through most of it and, quite frankly, I was growing so exasperated with the low quality of discussion that I just couldn't continue.

And yet at the same time, I was unable to simply walk away from it, because it did push me down some reasonably interesting avenues of thought. That explains why I'm here answering the siren call of the blogosphere, as opposed to actually writing something important. Like a book.

(Or at least finally finishing Robert Fagles' translation of The Aeneid)

Well, that's not really fair. This is important, otherwise I wouldn't be writing it, and hopefully you wouldn't be here reading it.

So the book is called The Question of God. The basic premise is simply that if Sigmund Freud, a militant atheist dedicated to the scientific materialist point of view, and C.S. Lewis, a devout believer advocating the religious spiritual point of view, had actually sat down and had a debate, what would it have been like? It sounds interesting, which is why I picked it up to begin with.

About halfway through, however, I was quite certain that neither side had the slightest idea of what they were talking about, and the narrator least of all. If there actually had been a debate and I'd had the bad fortune to actually attend, I wouldn't have hesitated to call a time out and tell them exactly that. At least I think I would have, if I’d been able to muster up enough spunk.

Still, the book reduced me to laughter at several points. And that's just wrong. I mean, these are arguably the two most well known, respected, and argued philosophers for their particular point of view that the twentieth century had to offer. Okay, maybe that's precisely what was wrong with the twentieth century, but I walked out of that debate feeling mentally, emotionally, and spiritually insulted.

Let's start with Freud since I admittedly know the least about him. True, he is the father of psychoanalysis. True, many of his points on the human mind and memory and transference and familial relations and so on were quite acute. No arguments there. I took some psychology in college and it has always been a subject of interest for me, though I have concentrated more on Freud's disciple, Carl Jung, than the master himself. This is probably because the late great mythologist Joseph Campbell always said that the older you got, the more Jung had to offer, and the less Freud did.

Campbell was right there, only I would argue that Freud has very little to say to begin with. Ids and egos aside, he took a wholly negative view of religion and mythology. All of it was infantile wish fulfillment, and any kind of mystical experience was reduced to libido or misplaced sexuality.

Actually, pretty much everything for Freud was misplaced sexuality.

The problem was when he tried to tackle the big problems of the universe from such a vantage point. The whole thing turns to rubbish, and Freud himself couldn't adequately come to terms with it. He suffered from depression most of his life apparently, and this came into play with his take on existence as a whole. Since a loving, intelligent energy guiding everything was no longer scientific and the cosmos itself was a clock without a clockmaker, Freud apparently felt that everything in nature was basically held together by a combination of brute force and blind stupidity.

And that included human beings.

This doesn't make for a particularly solid base on which to found a cosmology, but that was what he attempted to do. And, no surprise, he didn't do so successfully. As he himself put it, "I had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution." This made me laugh out loud. Quite frankly, it's not even scientific or the objectivity that science is allegedly founded on, but hey, at least it's wholly negative, so that's better than all this silly wishful thinking that religion offers up.

And this brings us to C.S. Lewis. In the interests of honesty, I will say my relationship with Lewis is considerably more complicated. For one thing, we have the Narnia paradox. Now, that's a subject for another essay altogether, and I would love to compose one with nothing holding up the spine of the whole thing but Aslan, the furry-footed, golden-maned God-in-disguise of that series.

Maybe I will and maybe I won't, but let's just admit for now that I love Narnia, that I grew up peering in closets hoping to find a way in, and that it was a profound landmark in the geography of my childhood imagination.

While I do find Lewis a very capable storyteller, that's not to say I'm entirely down with every message that is woven into the fabric of his imaginary countries. For the purposes of this essay, though, I think he is much more talented as a painter of mythic images in the heads of young children than he is as a theologian. But given the theology he was working inside of, perhaps that's not too surprising.

Lewis is a very interesting case in that he fell out of his faith very early, only to return to it later in life. He didn't undergo his own personal conversion until the ripe old age of thirty-one, and that irrevocably changed his life forever. Given his soft-spot for ancient mythology and medieval literature, this makes a certain amount of sense.

On the other hand, it is ironic that after being exposed to so many pagan myths with symbolism almost identical to the New Testament, he suddenly was persuaded into believing that the church of his native country was the real truth behind all of them. Maybe a bit too convenient, even with J.R.R. Tolkien twisting his arm? I get the feeling that a single conversation with Joseph Campbell would have made him an infinitely better thinker, but that's just me.

Nonetheless, there is something fundamentally off-putting about Lewis' inability to conceive of the divine as anything but a monarchichal father in heaven. His entire theology basically boils down to an is-or-isn't dichotomy, where not only is something true or false, but that people are either saved or damned, and it's his way or the highway.

Some of this is avoided in Narnia, but it shows itself all too plainly when Lewis argues that when Christ claimed to be God, he was either crazy, or lying, or telling the truth. Really? Because I can think of a lot of other explanations.

Maybe Christ was trapped in a Hebrew culture and tied to a language system that couldn't adequately express what he wanted to say. Maybe he simply meant it as an expression of oneness with not just a monarchichally-conceived God as described in the limited imagination of the Old Testament, but with the mystery underlying the billions of galaxies. Or maybe he was simply expressing what many, many sages, neither crazy or lying, have said throughout the cultures of Egypt and India and China and Japan.

Anyway, the main problem with Lewis actually stems from the way The Question of God frames his life after his conversion. Okay, well Lewis' weak theological arguments don't exactly help, but the author very much gives the impression that from his religious salvation onward, he really didn't have a significant problem for the rest of his life. It was all sunshine and roses, the universe dripping with meaning, and life itself filled to the brim with purpose. It is so one-sided as to be almost laughable.

And again, keep in mind every other philosophy and religion and cosmology is never even mentioned or discussed in any way. So much is left unsaid it's truly staggering, and if you want to know what, it would be easier to just check out the book than me trying to recount everything here. The main premise of the book is flat-out admitted by the narrator at the end when he simply states, "Whether we realize it or not, we all embrace some form of either the materialist worldview advocated by Freud or the spiritual worldview advocated by Lewis."

Right.

There you have it, people. The tragedy of postmodern civilization, all laid out for you in one little book. You can either believe in a giant invisible father figure who has a home waiting for you in the sky, or a dumb, mindless universe tottering precariously on predetermined laws. Never mind that we've already been to the sky in those wacky things called airplanes and there's nothing there, and never mind that a cosmos is operating under laws even though there is no such thing as a lawmaker.

So we have Freud crying sour grapes, and Lewis crying for the moon, and we all have to pick one or else.

Sigh.

As I've said many times, the problem with heaven and hell alike is that - between the two - there's simply nothing to choose. Or at least that's what so many people want you to think. I guess I'm here to deflate the whole thing and laugh as I do so.

This entire dilemma has been solved a dozen times over in the writings of Alan Watts, and nothing would give me more pleasure than to see him gingerly inserted into this mock argument between Freud and Lewis. His cheerful laughter would have poked a hole in all the solemn proceedings and brought them both back to something at least resembling reality. He may not be as well-known, but Watts was arguably the most important philosopher the twentieth century produced, the kind of sage that is perfectly capable of fashioning a middle bridge over the twin abysses of heaven and hell.

In point of fact, I've grabbed a quote from his cleverly titled autobiography In My Own Way which does the impossible task of nailing his entire philosophy in a paragraph -

"It is simply that I think people would be much happier and more at home in the world if they felt as I do, that I have no other self than this whole universe. I am not controlling it volitionally any more than I am controlling my autonomic nervous system, and at the same time it is not befalling or happening to any separate me as its observant victim. There is simply the whole process happening of itself, spontaneously, and with every pair of eyes it takes a fresh look at itself. This happening is what I call God, and what it is essentially is beyond all possible conception. I feel it most intently in a stillness of mind where words and ideas are not running around in my brain."

Really, folks, it's not that complicated. Poets and mystics have been saying the same thing for ages, though granted, always within the confines of their own cultures and belief systems. It's just that the pearls need dusting off and re-examining every now and again.

The important thing to understand is that this timeless, unavoidable conflict between such confused abstractions as "scientific materialism" and "spiritual truth" is neither timeless nor unavoidable. The chasm that separates science from religion and Freud from Lewis is, ironically, totally arbitrary. It isn't a law of the universe so much as an accident of history and a mystification of terms.

Perhaps one of the most important science books of the early twenty-first century, The View from the Center of the Universe tackles this very problem. It traces it back to the point in history when the world of science and the world of religion shook hands and decided to go their separate ways.

In the seventeenth century, Galileo virtually proved that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun as dictated by natural law, as opposed to the earth-centered view as espoused by the Bible. After his arrest and trial, other scientists like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes decided to take a much safer "hands-off" approach when it came to the Church, as well as spiritual matters in general.

"As the Church and scientists both went on to develop rationales for their respective realms of authority, a kind of social schizophrenia entered the culture," Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams state in The View, adding, "The physical world and the world of values and meaning were for the first time in history seen as two separate realities." In other words, science was not going to say anything about spirituality, and spirituality was not going to say anything about science.

Enter Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.

This is a sad state of affairs, and perhaps the central irony of the whole thing is that science has actually succeeded in providing a universe a million times larger, grander, and more spectacular than anything religion has had to offer. As William Blake said, "The fool who persists in his folly will become wise," and science has done exactly that. The minute Edwin Hubble discovered the Milky Way galaxy had at least a hundred billion stars in it and that it's just one of at least a hundred billion galaxies, all bets were off.

Of course, initially this led to just more cosmic angst. As the egg-headed mathematician-monk Blaise Pascal whined in a post-earth-centric cosmos, "I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing and which know nothing of me. I am terrified." Really, Blaise? Because it makes me happy. Not only happy, but relaxed. What can I say - I like my elbow room. And it's worth pointing out that Joel and Nancy argue in The View that such an emo-like stance isn't even science ... it's just bad French philosophy masquerading as science.

However displaced the human race once felt by science, the field itself has progressed far beyond Newtonian mechanics where everything is reduced to cold mathematical precision and Cartesian dualism where mind and matter are irrevocably divorced. Actually, the central, central irony of all this is that science has again provided a perfect, legitimate foundation for the most important aspect of religion, something that Western religion in particular has had problems with, namely the religious experience itself.

As Karen Armstrong points out in her great little book, A Short History of Myth, "Some of the very earliest myths, probably dating back to the Paleolithic period, were associated with the sky, which seems to have given people their first notion of the divine. When they gazed at the sky - infinite, remote and existing quite apart from their puny lives - people had a religious experience." So the stars have always been a source of mystic delight. Astronomy wasn't the end of religion, it actually just harkened back to the beginning of it. As Armstrong notes, the night sky was by itself "numinous," or capable of providing people with a transcendent experience independent of dogma or scripture.

And that was thirty thousand years before all those vast spinning galaxies and achingly beautiful nebula clouds were captured by the Hubble space telescope!

It seems to me that the religious experience itself has always been about connection, about coming into direct contact with something infinitely larger than one's self, and in the realization that every thing is somehow inexplicably one thing. Poets and sages have been intuitively stumbling over this fact for centuries. And as amazing as it sounds, science has finally caught up with them.

For instance, Walt Whitman once proclaimed that "A leaf of grass is nothing less than the journeywork of the stars." This could so easily be dismissed as poetic sentimentality, an overblown romanticism without regard for the basic division between subject and object. After all, what could a leaf of grass possibly have to do with the work of the stars?

Of course, a century and a half later, Neil DeGrasse Tyson basically said the said thing. One of the top astrophysicists in the world, Tyson argued in one of his essays found in Death By Black Hole that if a person was asked where they were from, they could simply respond by stating what town or city they were born in. Of course, an "astrochemically richer answer might be, 'I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago'."

And indeed, astronomers have realized that all the heavier elements that exist in the universe were produced by the nuclear fusion process that churns right in the heart of the largest stars. The stars then go supernova, and scatter those elements across the galaxy, basically seeding it with potential life. As the poets and scientists alike will tell you, we’re all stardust. Everything from the chair you're sitting in, the clothes you're wearing, the calcium in your bones, and the iron in your blood. It all connects you in a shattering intimacy with every star in the sky.

So not only did science not bury the idea that the kingdom of heaven is within you, it rather handily proved it. And even better, this is a cosmic heritage that operates regardless of race or religion, libido or creedo. It is the birthright of everyone on this planet, even Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis!

While it may be bad form and subjective for a scientist to form a personal opinion about the universe being something that we not only stare up into, but something that is also embedded right under our very skin, Neil DeGrasse Tyson still admitted on an episode of The Universe that he's personally inspired by the idea. Staring at the camera, he said straight up that the fact that not only are we in the universe but that the universe is in us "makes me smile."

My own particular sensibilities do fall right in line with this worldview. When I personally find religion, I find it in strange places. This includes the theory of evolution, something that has been at war with fundamentalist religion for the better part of a century.

Most of us have heard the theory before. It cites an unbroken chain of life that has evolved on this planet from a single-celled organism, and that this is more likely than not where we come from. Honestly, I find nothing even remotely distasteful about this idea. It even makes me smile a little.

Evolution is not to be understood as all "bloody tooth and claw," where everything simply goes around killing everything else. This is popular though stupid misconception that colors so many people's idea of what evolution is. Put simply, if every big animal just went around randomly killing every small animal, then pretty obviously, everything would be dead.

The dreaded phrase "survival of the fittest" has never meant nature inherently favors the strong over the weak. From a certain point of view, it simply points to the notion that the organisms that are fittest are those that can not only form harmonious, symbiotic relationships with their environment, but also those that can cooperate. Evolution hardly favors parasites over cooperation because, after all, when a parasite successfully kills its host, both of them die. This is hardly "fit."

While sitting in a botany class in college, what really struck me about evolution was that ultimately - ultimately - it pointed to a holistic view of life and the physical world where everything was again profoundly connected. The large depended on the small, and the strong depended on the weak, and basically every multi-cellular organism can trace its ancestry back to a common cell. What's even remotely alienating or depressing about that?

Even when some hard-nosed scientist comes around and says that that means we basically evolved out of strains of bacteria and owe our existence not to an all-perfect heavenly father but to the oozing slime of the earth, that still doesn't phase me. Instead of constantly seeing that as some sort of a de-motion of the human race, why can't we flip it around and just as accurately see that it's a pro-motion of bacteria?

After all, if all it takes is about four billion years for the first prokaryotic cell to produce an Albert Einstein, shouldn't that drastically heighten our respect for so-called oozing slime? And when all is said and done, is this process really that radically different than the one that takes place between sperms and fertilized eggs in the female body all the time? Is the level of miraculous transformation really that different?

What sets me apart is that all of this strangely strikes me as a much sturdier base for religion or theology than much of what's being shouted down from the pulpits. For the longest time, I hesitated to admit such ideas, because they are really the exact opposite of what everyone else feels. Or so I thought.

A magazine known as The Skeptic featured an issue celebrating the works of Carl Sagan, the legendary astronomer. One of the writers interviewed Anne Druyan, who was Sagan's wife as well as a scientist in her own right. When pressed about the creation versus evolution controversy, she answered that all in all, she found the story science told to be much more convincing.

Well, this isn't that surprising. But what is surprising is that she thought the theory of evolution, including its insight into the deep and powerful biological connections that hold the whole tapestry of life together, was much more "spiritually satisfying" than anything mentioned in Genesis. On the contrary, our God-given role as basically "middle management" and "lords of the field" served to remove us from our real heritage and dissociated us from the world of nature. In short, it wasn't a more spiritual view of the universe, but a significantly less one.

To so many people, this would be going too far. Or maybe it wouldn't. This is simply a side of science that hasn't been told. There is still a very legitimate fear that to give too much validity to our feelings rather than our observations might upset the entire boat that science has been successfully sailing around in for the past four hundred years. And yet as it now stands, it offers up a very incomplete view of humanity and the cosmos. Human beings are not intellects alone - we feel our way through as much as anything, and that's important.

In some ways, there are certain intellectual elements in the current scientific cosmology that really don't make sense. Even scientifically. For instance, our theory of consciousness hits nothing short of a brick wall when spied through the lens of our current biological paradigm. Yet the scientific community for the most part clings to a rather silly theory of "emergence," wherein the entire cosmos is unintelligent matter, and only by some crazy evolutionary fluke did consciousness somehow magically "spring" out of our brains when they got complicated enough.

It was fairly recently that I came across a school of thought known as "panpsychism," which is roughly translated as "all mind." It basically cites that physical "matter" and spiritual "mind" are twin aspects of the exact same thing, like two sides of a coin. While it hasn't been embraced by science at large, it does provide a much more satisfying way of explaining how exactly something as ethereal as consciousness managed to evolve out of something as material as the brain.

This isn't to imply that everything "thinks," but it does imply that everything is in some sense alive. Everything from subatomic particles to molecules to DNA strands to planets to stars to galaxies. It's all conscious, though obviously not self-conscious to the degree that we are. A tree can't think about thinking, though their basic structure and design can be seen as intelligence in and of itself.

Human brains are unique, but as the most complex forms of matter in the universe, it only stands to reason that they would produce the most complex forms of consciousness.

Now every Romantic poet who ever wandered as lonely as a cloud or swooned over an old abbey knew that nature was in some sense animate or alive. They knew it intuitively. As the literary critic Meyer Abrams once cited in his work, The Mirror and the Lamp, basically every theory of poetry to come out of Romanticism also involved in some way an organic conception of the universe. This was in strict revolt against the Cartesian Bargain of the Enlightenment, which had science positing the cosmos as "celestius machina," or as a celestial machine.

This is one of the many ways in which religion and science have tended to hamstring each other. Science was adamant about getting rid of the watchmaker who made the universe, but at the same time, they ironically kept the notion that the universe was a watch. This makes no sense, and creation scientists have been having a field day with it for the last century.

So much confusion would have been spared had science somehow managed to blend some romanticism in with its worldview. Impossible, maybe, but one of my fundamental philosophies is that the cosmos as conceived as a machine has been disastrous on both sides. After all, machines have to be built by an energy and intelligence outside themselves, whereas self-regulating organisms are grown by an energy and intelligence from within.

Though he may be loathe to admit it, Freud's conception of the universe as blind, stupid libido grew directly out of Genesis. In the second story of creation, God has to formally come in and "breathe" life into the clay figure of Adam, thus separating life from the clay itself. This, coupled with the firm and fast though completely fictitious dualism of the Greeks, set us on a road whereby any view of the universe as intelligent or alive was swept under the rug and completely dismissed.

Still, the poets have always known better, though Lewis himself was slightly queasy about saying so. William Wordsworth, on the other hand, spoke of how our "meddling intellects/ Misshape the beauteous forms of things." His close connection with nature was overwhelming, no matter what the current religious or scientific trends of the day may have been. In his first edition of The Prelude, he said it as simply and eloquently as he could - "In all things, I saw one life,/ And felt that it was joy."

This may strike some readers as completely ludicrous, this proposition that everything is fundamentally joy. But not me. On the contrary, if the universe is not fundamentally made of joy, even with all its death and decay and destruction, what exactly is the point of a universe at all? Surely it would have found a way to commit suicide by now if it really was, as Freud suggested, a "regrettable institution."

As Alan Watts pointed out, it only stands to reason that we come at the universe with an optimal theory. And there's no better proof for the basic existential bliss of existence than the fact that anything exists at all. Because really, it's a lot of trouble for something to exist, and if it's not really worth it, than why bother? He was adamant that existence was all a dance, a play, a drama, or at least a game. And that game had to be great from the outset, regardless of how badly we human beings played it.

This may not be scientific, but on the other hand, why isn't it? We may be pole-vaulting to conclusions here, but that's just it. We, as human beings, are here. Objectivism aside, at some point in time, we have to be taken into account as being part of the equation. So maybe subjectivity isn't a bad thing after all.

As Watts would say, at least in this galaxy, in this particular solar system, on this particular planet, the universe is evolving people. And after all, we call a tree an apple tree because it produces apples, so why in the world can't we see the cosmos as a human cosmos? Right here and now, the universe is producing human beings, as surely as an apple tree apples. To deny that would be to deny the empirical evidence.

Watts gave the best definition of humanity I've ever heard. He said that we were the entire universe looking at itself from six billion different points of view. And why? Because it's so wildly entertaining, so endlessly fascinating, that the universe had to devise a way to develop eyes and ears and noses and bodies sensitive enough to absorb the whole show. So here we are.

Well, this has gone on for considerably longer than I ever intended, but let's wrap things up with a little help from none other than Albert Einstein himself.

A few months ago, I purchased a book titled Einstein in His Own Words. As you might imagine, it's about Einstein, and it's in his own words. Though he was the scientist par excellence of the twentieth century what with that whole theory of relativity thing, he had a lot to say about religion. Maybe, just maybe, we can use him to nudge the parallel tracks of Lewis and Freud a little closer together.

Generally speaking, Einstein was critical of organized religion. Apparently, he often bemoaned the fact that humanity as a whole couldn't conceive of a "more sublime means" through which to envision the divine except through a personal god. A god who took excessive interest in the comings and goings of human beings and even handed out rewards and punishments based on their behavior was ludicrous to Einstein. He had no use whatsoever for personal immortality, and thought those who sought it were "feeble souls."

Interestingly, though, he had what he called a very profound and well-developed "cosmic religious sense." It didn't revolve around an anthropomorphic God, but nonetheless was a kind of undeniable rapture at the order and harmony of the universe. And while he said that the "concept of a soul without a body seems to [him] to be empty and devoid of meaning," he wasn't opposed to the idea of a soul altogether.

He rather perfectly described himself as being a "devoutly religious non-believer," and yeah, I know just how he feels.

In point of fact, Einstein lightly played about with "pantheism," which is the notion that the physical universe and all of nature was a manifestation of God. He especially liked the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, remarking that he was critical to modern thought because "he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things."

While never making concrete religious statements, Einstein still celebrated the "beautiful and deepest experience a man can have," namely a sense of the mysterious. And then he went on to say that that sense is the domain of religion and science alike.

Personally, I ache with that "cosmic religious sense" that he spoke of. Sometimes it infuses me until it threatens to lift me right off the ground. But at the same time, it grounds me, and lets me feel perfectly at home in the universe. No matter how ill at ease I have been with the institutions and nation-states and belief systems of humanity, I have never had a quarrel with existence itself. Whether among trees and mountains and streams and fields, or just gazing up into the infinity of a star-embroidered night, it is impossible for me to feel the slightest pang of despair or alienation.

Existence as a whole delights me and teases me and fascinates me and charms me, and that is something that neither Lewis nor Freud ever took into account. It was a possibility they simply never entertained it.

Back in the early days of Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge jotted down a few very telling lines. With his imagination burning inside him, he conceived of the universe as nothing less than a great Eolian harp, played by an ineffable transcendence - “And what if all of animated nature/ Be but organic harps diversly fram’d/ That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps/ Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and God of all?”

Sound overblown, no pun intended? Or at least irreconcilable with science? Obviously, you haven’t heard of string theory, an idea formulated by theoretical physicists. It is the mathematical equivalent of Coleridge’s poem, citing the possibility that at its deepest level, physical reality is looped, vibrating strings of matter. So perhaps it is all a musical phenomenon after all.

And if that’s what the universe really is, then it’s no wonder we can’t understand it through any amount of talk. The only way of truly understanding the universe is simply by stepping off the sidelines, letting the rhythm overtake you, and joining in the dance. The beat carries on through, from the thumping of our hearts to the twinkling of the stars.

For the record, I’ve never heard of Sigmund Freud or C.S. Lewis ever once hitting the dance floor and cutting up the rug, and I guess that's the most telling thing of all.

On the Lighter Side