The Monster God Projected Over God
Hey, here’s an idea: in this fallen, debased, forgetful state we misperceive God – the sole God – this way; there is only one God, but at this level our view of him is distorted into the illusory figure of Yaldabaoth, so that even if and when we become aware of God we are alienated from him. He assumes (to us; the fault lies with us) a horrific, punishing, cruel, deranged aspect – but this just shows the debased, occluded state we are in![1]
Philip K. Dick has caught on to one of the secrets of world history: our encounter with God is distorted. The Gnostic Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, can only be seen as a projection placed upon God himself, for there is only one God. The evil or crazy God of the Gnostics is not really God, but the image of God we have created as a result of our own failed comprehension of God. The history of human history and its encounter with God must, in a way, be understood in this fashion: God is there, revealing himself, and humanity is there, obscuring God, creating a false image of God based upon its obscured vision of God. Popular images of God in history can be based upon real encounters with God, but the human subject, incapable of understanding God as he is, projects a cover for God which the subject can then comprehend. It might be that this cover was understood as such by the original people encountering God, but through time, it was misconstrued and created an image which was believed to be what God is – a God who is comprehended by humanity.
One of the great problems Christians have to face is that the way they have described and explained God to others does not, in the end, actually describe God. Even in their encounter with God, constructions are made. A popular image of God develops which runs contrary to the nature of God that can be discerned through the union of revelation and reason. This image, while containing elements of the truth, nonetheless is corrupted by all kinds of projection. It is what people think about when they think of the word God. While theology works to purify the popular image of God, the way most people know and understand God is through the lens of their own sin. They don’t know about or heed what theology says. They know the popular image, and they either worship it or they denounce it. Only slowly does the popular image change as society changes; new sins develop, new projections are put upon God, while old sins no longer hold sway, and their impact upon God is removed.
While there are many streams of atheism in the world, one of the most popular sources is the internal discord atheists discern within the popular image of God. They see what is said about God is self-contradictory. They see the human projection which is used to create the image of God. Combining the two together, they denounce what they see. There is truth in this – all falsehood is based upon some truth, and here, unbeknown to the atheists themselves, their rejection is valid, because the image of God is false. “It may be that modern atheism is providential in showing us the urgent need to purify our idea of God, and to raise the dialogue to a biblical and patristic plane, above all scholastic systems, all purely academic theology.”[2]Atheists call Christians to the task of purifying their image of God, to let God be God and not misrepresent him based upon our systematic constructs and the projections the place over God. However, when they move beyond the popular image and reject God because of the popular image, they err – as anyone would err if they reject science because scientists have had a history of creating and propagating erroneous hypotheses. They might, for some time, hold sway, but, in the end, their negation cannot last.
It is easier to proclaim the call to purify our image of God than it is to do it. We rely upon our experience of God, the experience of others with God, and reason to help present a newer, better image. However, when we encounter God, sin gets in the way – it becomes a kind of spiritual cataract which distorts our vision of God and so makes us see God in the light of sin, a God who ends up taking on our sin so that he becomes like a monster to us. It is our sin which we see; it is our sin which corrupts our image of God. If we do not know this, we end up becoming terrified by what we see and understand of God. If we know it, we might know we have to overcome our sin to get a better vision of God, but on the other hand, we will still talk about God in an erroneous way when we talk about God with others. We might and should try to overcome this through analogical talk – but even then, we must appreciate that our audience might not understand such analogy and follow the letter of what we say instead of engaging the spirit which lies behind it. Once again, then, God gets distorted.
God is love, but what does this love mean? It is the source of bliss, but it can also be the source of our suffering, as Sergius Bulgakov explains. “God’s love, it must be said, is also His justice. God’s love consumes in fire and rejects what is unworthy, while being revealed in this rejection.”[3] God raises us up and purifies us as we are in his presence; but if we grasp after sin and try to follow sin, and lean on it for our being, we will find God’s love to be painful, and the fire of love will be a fire of judgment, judging us as long as we hold on to that sin. If we do not comprehend that we, in our grasping for sin, make such suffering, our understanding of God, our witness of God, be one which declares God as rejecting us, when in reality, through our sin, we have rejected him. Our image of God, marred by our sin, projects upon God what we do to him. This is exactly what the fires of hell are all about – the self-imposed suffering we create by grasping after that which holds us down, the unbeing of sin.
The Torah reveals to us a history of God revealing himself to Israel. It is recorded and described by humans, and so, without surprise, human frailty and misperception get in the way. The spirit is lost to the letter of the text, and the letter of the text slowly can lead to a monstrous image of God. But behind that image, there is the true God encountering and helping Israel, and a proper understanding of the text (taking the spirit and not the letter of the text) allows one to see the God of love who is further revealed in the incarnation. The whole of the Torah speaks of Jesus – and so, it is right to look for him in them. “You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me” (John 5:39 RSV). But if you look for Jesus in the letter of the text, you will barely see him. You must look deeper, look to the hidden truths contained in the Torah, spirit behind the text and not the letter, and then you will see Jesus, and you will see Jesus all over the Torah (as can be attested by the writings of Origen). In them you will see, not a monster, but the God who is love revealed.
But that love, when encountered in sin, is seen as wrath. Is it not surprising that, before the final revelation of Christ and the full institution of grace, the way most understood God was one which saw him full of anger and a barely controllable urge to destroy sinners? Sin contaminated the vision, and the letter which got put out put forth that wrath more than the love which lay behind it. It was sin which made this vision. But behind it, we can still see God the liberator, God the lover of humanity whose work is to liberate those afflicted by the structures of power sin creates in the world. This, we see, is what is shown in full in Jesus, who in the purity of his humanity, is able to present to us the fullness of God’s love without any contamination in the message (and who, in his divinity, is capable of liberating us from our sin). To follow Jesus is to let him liberate us from sin, and with it, all the false ideas we have of God due to it – we must let him be put in control if we want him to lead us to the promised land:
Now revelation is precisely this: God himself is manifest as totally different from any idea that we can have about him. For God reveals himself by allowing human persons to receive themselves from God and also to receive God as other. To believe in God is therefore for persons to open their heart and their intelligence to a purification compelling them to accept that they are not the master of the one who comes to them, and to accept that they are not their own master.[4]
When we see God and are not ready for God, he will scare us. He will terrify us. “He is trying to signal to us to wake up; but, not knowing our condition, we misperceive him this way (i.e., Palmer Eldritch) This is both a symptom of our fall and, as well, perhaps the greatest tragedy, this alienation from God.”[5] In the 60s, PKD had a vision of a great monstrosity in the sky, which was used to create the character Palmer Eldritch, who he sometimes would sometimes believe represented a misunderstood visage of God, while other times, more as an evil, Satanic figure who imitates the way of God. Both ideas have value, and both could, in their way, be true – for the spirit might be God, but the letter can be used to establish and create a dark, evil parody of God which will eat us up with his empty nihilistic unbeing, reversing what happens to us when we partake of the eucharist where God raises us up and incorporates us in his absolute being. And in this way, have we not come to understand, at last, the spirit and the letter in relation to the Holy Scriptures, such as with Torah? St Paul tells us the spirit gives life and the letter kills – here we can see why; the letter takes our sin and uses it to destroy us, to make our encounter with God one of great sorrow and pain, while the spirit seeks to free us from sin and so encounter God with great, eternal joy, where pain and sorrow are no more.
[1] Philip K. Dick, Exegesis. ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2011), 754-5.
[2] Paul Evdokimov, Ages of the Spiritual Life. Trans. Sister Gertrude, S.P. Revised trans. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 42.
[3] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2002), 475.
[4] Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, Dare To Believe. Trans. Nelly Marans and Maurice Couve de Murville (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 117.
[5] Philip K. Dick, Exegesis, 755.
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Henry,
I like the idea of this post generally. The Gnostic “monster God” idea is — to say the obvious– indebted to how one conceives Gnosticism generally as well. Gnosticism is often treated like a field one could describe, with actual views and “beliefs” — of course counter to “orthodox” ones. In fact Gnosticism was only ever a sort of pressure-reliever or default position for those who in some way or other found themselves at odds with reigning orthodoxies. Once we grasp the true nature of the phenomenon it becomes also clear that even strictly orthodox positions can contain the default “monster” position and often have. This is how while high-brow theology often had a remarkably consistent emphasis on God’s love throughout the centuries, the actual application of that theology very often veered towards a “monster” position. I submit that the view of hell and damnation that obtained for much of the Catholic Church’s history is utter proof of this fact. This is not the same as saying that there mere belief in hell or damnation was related to the phenomenon. Rather, I defy a modern person to defend the very often monstrous application of that view in the past by today’s standards. This cannot be explained away as changing conceptual fashions or “contexts”. (or God forbid hermeneutics of hell). Rather it is a pure example of the dark possibilities of religious rhetoric generally in all ages. Lastly, the existence of coherent philosophies from those same periods do not obviate the need to recognize these simple phenomena, which are not in dispute –even by Catholic historians!
Peter,
Yes, I would say many within an “orthodox view” have created a monster-God. Christians have created false images which are rightfully rejected — especially when analogies are slowly converted into legalities. I am quite strongly in the apophatic tradition — and so I always prefer this caveat in all I say about God, to remind people that words about God are at best pointers. So the monster is there in orthodoxy, especially with the way orthodoxy is interpreted by the popular mass. This then makes people shudder and reject orthodoxy — or create some Gnostic response to it. What I want to point out is that even if there is a monster which is seen, it is often based upon a true experience of God which is not a monster. The monstrous construct is what is added to it.
As for the question of hell, I fall between von Balthasar and Origen – even more hopeful than von Balthasar, but still accepting free will must have an element in it all.
Henry,
Well then if you are willing to admit that much about orthodoxy, then why the tsk-tsks over tropes of gnosticism?? If the truth is ultimately apophatic, or at least the true experience, then surely the often faulty notions of gnostic views are just as good as orthodox ones?? Or is there a final deus ex machina of orthodoxy waiting offstage?? Just in a special form, probably, to make a guess….
Peter
This isn’t a “tsk-tsk” as you say. It is an engagement of PKD (who viewed himself as a Gnostic).
How does this human propensity for constructing monster-gods mesh with a belief in the divine inspiration of holy scripture? It’s easy to see the ferocious warmongering of the Lord God of the Old Testament as a cultural construct of the times, for example, but then what do we make of that today?
What it means is:
1) There was a real, divine encounter. God was indeed working with and for the protection of Israel
2) However, we see a progressive revelation and understanding as the work of God worked to purify Israel
3) So hidden behind the progression, shown through the experiences of the people of Israel, we see the work of God and (if one follows through, understanding the spirit and not the letter one can find Jesus even in the OT– the works of Origen, as I suggested, show this quite well)
And so to continue, I would also say the way we read the encounter in the Torah itself is often the problem, making the monster God — Jesus represents the authentic interpretation of the Torah, but when we realize that, it means we realize the exegetics we often use is wrong. And I think PKD here is explaining a source of it. So there are layers and layers going on: the human encounter with God, the way it is expressed in written form, the way the spirit was slowly removed by the letter, the way we read the letter now… etc.
Henry, thank you for a fine reflection with clarity and insight.
“It may be that modern atheism is providential in showing us the urgent need to purify our idea of God…”
This very much reminds me of a comment from Benedict’s message “Pilgrims of Truth, Pilgirims of Peace” give recently in Assisi. He invited agnostics to attend and placed them as protagonists between atheists and believers…
This is not a peripheral message, its at the core of dysfunctional religion. A proper diagnosis precedes the cure.
Right, Pope Benedict (following Vatican II, among other sources) rightfully acknowledged this aspect of atheism as a help to us, so we can continue our reformation instead of sitting still and letting things get reified. You present a great example of this — Assisi (now and under JPII) has been a great message for the world, but also for Catholics who need to learn what the Popes want us to understand!
Tausign and Henry,
I very much hope that this strand or skein of thought about atheism or agnosticism is something that gets accepted as a way of dialogue for the Roman Catholic Church. I am not someone drawn to atheism per se, but I do not find it a threat, and often feel it is more healthy than many forms of religion. I applaud this willingness to engage on your parts — and even the Pope’s (yikes!) — and think it speaks to real profundity.
Peter
You will certainly find this dialogue with atheism in major theological thinkers (Catholic or otherwise), and it’s clear Pope Benedict is influenced by some of them (Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, et. al) — the difficulty is getting the non-specialists to understand the value…
Henry,
I don’t blame you for putting it that way, for that is how we intellectuals are wont to see the world. Our tendency is always to think insufficient education, or lack of “getting people to understand” is at the root of the problem, whatever it is. Ideas matter in the world, sometimes a lot. But history shows vastly that they are always very secondary. Again, sometimes a strong second influence or kind of crucial bolster. But changes are made truly ONLY by leaders who make decisive movements in one direction or other. And such leaders always, use the events in “current events” to navigate the applicability of the vision or ideas they use for their decision. This is the way of the world. In this sense, the Pope may entertain some of these thoughts, but as a leader he is clearly NOT making any decisive choices — at least in public — to further such a viewpoint. I encourage you to work in that direction, it is a mitzvah, but it will only be realistically from some internal criticism in the Roman Church itself that will motivate the leaders to chart a different course. Lastly, the fact that they (the Bishops) heavily and publicly support an effort like EWTN could not speak with more depressingly eloquence against your general assertion.
It would seem to me that teaching Jesus by reference to the OT is like teaching a child to read by placing an extra letter or two in every word, so that those extra letters need to be identified and removed before the true word can be discerned.
We have Jesus, in his own words, and in the words of his contemporaries (or near contemporaries) in the Gospels; and it can be easily shown that the OT, while superfluous to showing us Jesus, also causes more trouble than it’s worth. I’m with Marcion to that extent.
The OT can be used to incite every kind of hideous violence and hatred, and it makes little difference to the victims that the carnage is based on bad exegesis. It is much more difficult (though not impossible) to base violence on the words of the New Testament, and much easier to show the error in it by reference to the larger context.
For all of these reasons, I prefer those Gnostic interpretations of the Demiurge which interpret it not as a human projection onto God the Father, but rather as a lower emanation who is both real and responsible for the obvious flaws in the material creation.
The Christ is sent to activate that spark of truth inherent in each of us, so that we can begin to make our way back to our true home.
Rodak,
I am not chiming in to argue against your personal belief on this matter. But I would like to offer that there may a way of seeing those same insights without the necessity of endorsing the Gnostic “mythology” if I may put it that way. Specifically in terms of the Old Testament I think you are describing an impulse that is similar in vibe, if not in exact content, to the Kabbalists. We have a texts in the Old Testament which on their face are sometimes pretty grim. We must first be careful to NOT look at this with post-Enlightenment eyes in this case, because then we will utterly miss what motivated the impulse. In that previous view questioning the religious facticity of the text as a description of reality was not a real option. So some sort of exploration of the same themes using extra-textual religious ideas that could dove-tail was clearly needed. To me what this makes clear is that in some sense the continuance of the use of rather grim text was often based on the often presumed and de facto extra-textual imaginative capacity of receiving generations. Catholic Conciliar pronouncements did try to limit that amplitude of this whole phenomenon. But then it was often transmogrified into a truly incredible filigree of theological precision and even preciosity. I think this explains the truly amazing University of Paris phenomenon of debate and deliberation that developed in the medieval West. This has no real counter-part in other civilizations, at least as to the height of the development. One can read that development as conservative religionists do and see it as the proof of the nth degree of reliability of the Catholic vision. Or one can see it as a mere pressure-reliever for essentially unstable OT-NT relationship you have so sharply alluded to.
PPF–
It’s not so much a “personal belief” as it is a satisfying intellectual construct. If the OT were to have been kept esoteric and for consideration only by such scholars and sages as would not be misled by the literal surface level of the texts, that would be one thing. But to have the thing in the hands of every barely-literate yahoo who thinks that God helps NASCAR drivers achieve greatness based on their fearlessness in handling poisonous reptiles in their backwoods churches, is quite another.
Finally, the interesting questions are raised by the Problem of Evil. And those questions remain–regardless of how we interpret the scriptures within an orthodox Christian context. I say this because it is clear that they’ve never been satisfactorily answered, or even honestly addressed, within the Church and its spin-offs. The blame is still being placed on the flawed product, rather than on the designer or his machinery. That is nonsense on the face of it. The Gnostics (like the Kabalists) in their various schemes at least made an honest attempt. Since it was deemed necessary to ruthless stamp them out, they must have been making some pretty good headway in their heyday. As an American politician might admit: “Mistakes were made.”
“…the interesting questions are raised by the Problem of Evil. And those questions remain–regardless of how we interpret the scriptures within an orthodox Christian context. I say this because it is clear that they’ve never been satisfactorily answered, or even honestly addressed, within the Church and its spin-offs. The blame is still being placed on the flawed product, rather than on the designer or his machinery. That is nonsense on the face of it. The Gnostics (like the Kabalists) in their various schemes at least made an honest attempt…”
Well, FWIW, I consider myself an orthodox Christian, but I couldn’t agree more: Blaming evil on sin doesn’t cut it for anybody who puts more than two seconds of thought to the problem, which is where “it’s a mystery” usually comes in. The Gnostics came up with some creative alternatives, just none as compatible with Christian revelation (or modern science, for that matter) as the catchall “it’s a mystery.” That may be a placeholder, but it’s an honest one, at least in my opinion.
Rodak,
Love it! I want to break into a rendition of Sportin Life’s song from Porgy and Bess “It Ain’t Necessarily So” ……”the things that you’re liable, to read in the Bible, they ain’t necessarily so.”
Actually, I see the real mystery to reside in the attempt to blame imperfection on imperfection and then going on from there to insist that in so doing an answer has been given–or even attempted. “Because I said so” is an exercise of power, not of the faculty of reason. The questions being posed partake of logic and reason; “It’s a mystery” does not.
The “it’s a mystery” boys got no game.
PPF–
You mock. But that’s always the endgame in this discussion. Unless you’re in a pub. Then it’s quite likely fisticuffs.
Rodak,
You took me all wrong, seriously. I seriously loved what you said. No mockery. Unless I completely misunderstand you you are not far from the wisdom of Sportin’ Life. But a more rational version thereof. Anyways, I’m too old to fight. I just do philosophy instead. Cheers, buddy!
I’ll wager that I’m older than you, PPF. Also, I’ve pretty much given up bar-hopping. Peace is good. Extravagent praise never fails to make me wary (he said arching an eyebrow…um…archly.)
Rodak,
I am old enough to have worn a “leisure suit” to special school functions in seventh grade.
I’ll be 65 in January.