Dreaming the Future Closer

I’m thinking of this as a ‘throat-clearing’ post.   There’s a lot that I have been thinking about, but it seems to be all running together in my head.  What I want to do is think through the issues that define the blockage and untangle them a bit.  If you, dear readers, come away with a clearer picture of my goals, all the better.  It will probably take more than one post.  First. before I forget, the cut.

I’m going to list off, in no particular order, the underlying problems and assumptions that have been spurring me on lately. 

Syncretism and eclecticism are both essential ingredients of a living religion.  Notice, please, the use of both those terms.  Following its usage among the Greek and Roman philosophers I want to distinguish the composition of a personal system (eclectic) from the intermingling of elements between religions (syncretism).

That division is key.  Eclecticism focuses our attention on individual religious people and the decisions they make in following their spiritual path.  Syncretism focuses our attention on the religion as a nexus of social forces and the kinds of consensus that define religious convention.

Eclectics (those engaged in the reasoned combination of different religious elements) clearly play some role in the process of syncretism.  You need individual agents to accept that other concepts and practices are valuable in order for their incorporation in a religion’s body of practices to become an issue.  However, syncretism is not identical to eclecticism.  Eclecticism is ‘checked’ in the religion by forces that sustain the tradition.

Those ‘forces’ are not just other practitioners, by the way.  They include things like how the tradition is sustained.  For example, the core texts (oral or textual) of a religion may not be subject to much change even while the clergy accepts a great deal of eclecticism on the part of its members.  Since that eclecticism does not make it into the core texts, it is more easily lost.

Religion, personal and social, relate people to forces that are bigger than our historical experience.  There are a few facets to this problem.  First, quite literally, spirit is bigger than history.  This is a bit of a no-brainer, but it bears repeating.  The history of a thing is not identical to that thing.  Histories are emendations, shorthand, to help us move about in time.

Second, though, it’s important to remember that the connections between the religions of the world, like the connections that join the people of the world, predate all of our histories.  If, as we think today, humanity shares a common origin in Africa, then so does our religious experience.  The nature of those connections are lost to us, though, so we must make do with a ’sense’ of those connections.

Saying that, I want to steer clear of some more Jungian ways of framing that relationship.  I don’t really think that there are archetypes from which all images of spirit are derived.  Quite the opposite, I really do believe that there is some truth to the ‘hard polytheist’s’ claim that each pantheon represents a ‘real’ and distinct set of spirits. 

However, knowing what we do of how worship of a spirit spreads almost by diffusion to nearby peoples, I have a hard time accepting the firm boundaries of pantheons.  Surely, even as travel brought people to encounter new spirits, so too did it bring old spirits to new places.  Since we will never have a clear image of that process, we ought to have some humility in regards to the very human conceptions of a pantheon.

Too much eclecticism is a bad thing; so is too little.  While eclecticism is a necessary feature of religious life, an over-emphasis of it seems to result in an overly rational idea of religion.  While that might seem counter-intuitive to some (how can something be too rational?), it relates to the previous concern about the limits of history.  Reason is a human faculty and remains bound up in our limited being in the world. 

Moreover, we have a tendency to accept something rational, something that seems logical, as necessarily true.  There are probably many reasons for this, but the one that seems most prominent to me is this: reason allows us to do more by creating shorthands of how things work, principles if you will.  Those principles allow us to generalize to other situations, s[peeding up how we learn.  However, in doing so, we don’t engage with the concrete world so much, more with our ideas of it.  Those ideas come to seem more real to us than the actual situation.

In religious experience, where the objects of our worship are already so subtle, too much reason can have a lethal effect on our worship.  It can lead us to a kind of narcissism, where we are only worshipping our own ideas.  I don’t know if there is an easy way to avoid this danger, except to keep it firmly fixed in our minds, keep our doubts ready-to-hand, and fix our eyes closely on our religious experience.

I know some would suggest traditionalism as an answer to this dangerous eclecticism, but that traditionalism risks substituting a social rationality for a personal one, bringing no one any closer to the divine.  Here, you see the need for an eclectic attitude capable of checking that social rationality.