Thursday 19 May 2016

God or Man?

God or Man? Which is it to be? That’s the rather-too-neat equation posed by Western culture which, since the 20th century, has been answered decisively for the latter.

Friedrich Nietzsche grandly announced "God is dead", but God inevitably had the last say, pronouncing Nietzsche dead at the premature age of 55. Touché!

The overthrow of God – that is, divine agency in human affairs and in the universe at large – has been perhaps the most important feature of what we call modernity. Gradually, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial revolutions with concurrent economic and technological changes, Europeans concluded that humanity created its own destiny (indeed had always done so) and that God was just another production of the human mind.

When religion had always said that everything came from God, now everything was the result of the objective forces and dynamics of the universe that Western science revealed. Humanity was responsible for its own self, freed from servitude to a fictional Creator.

There are, it must be said, a host of problems with the modernist worldview, which have increasingly been voiced in recent decades in what many thinkers call the "post-modern" era. And there are those, some calling themselves "traditionalists", who have maintained the pre-modern religious outlook, pointing to the majority of the world’s people who are still directed by a religious calling.

While deeply flawed, I think modernism presents important opportunities for humanity’s overall development. Seen from a big-picture view of our cultural evolution it is in the end a phase, a particular period in history that needs to be treated with open inquiry.

In raising human agency to the fore, modernity pierced the fiction that social circumstances were divinely ordained and somehow fixed for all time. As the core of pre-modern society, religion had sanctioned much that began to be open for questioning: slavery, wars, hierarchical power structures, class injustice, the inferior role of women etc. Religious reformers tried to breathe new life into their institutions, but as change and human agency became more important to society, there seemed less place for the eternal dimension of reality – for God. In the end He retreated to the seemingly changeless environment of the religious sanctuary, the church, there to rule over a vastly diminished domain.

Modernity raised a crucial question that religion has struggled with ever since: If the divine is the true source of all reality, what is its relationship to a changing world? For thousands of years there had been no separation between the social and spiritual dimensions of human life, but the two were now noticeably apart. Adding to that, it was clear that throughout history religious institutions had muddied the nature of the sacred by attaching it to that which was clearly human in origin and fallible. Sacred texts like the Bible were written so long ago that much of what they contained seemed of little or no relevance.

What is the relationship of the changeless to a changing world? I think the sacred needs to be restored to its proper place at the higher or meta-dimensions of being – at the levels of inspiration, revelation and wisdom. At these more refined spaces it is still there to guide us, still there for us to apprehend it as the source of all life, without being reduced by human desires to fit human ends. When prescriptive morality appears, when God is said to will this or that, we know we are in the hands of the mortal and not the divine.

To be sure, morality and good behaviour are important and indeed indispensable for a properly spiritual life, but we also need to recognise that much about society and its mores changes over time and spirit can never be reduced to human particulars. The divine always exists at higher levels of our apprehension, and with anything concrete in the world we ought to ask "What is the higher Truth here?”, "What is the inspired or soulful response?" in order to approach the sacred.

The divine is not remote to human concerns at the higher dimensions of being when it’s appreciated that these dimensions are very much woven into the fabric of everyday life and accessible at any moment. The more that we are able to open to inspiration, revelation, wonder and creativity in daily living, the more the sacred is available to us. As we bring it into our lives, the separation between the human and the divine starts to lessen until, at some progressed point of development, the "divine human" is actuated. This is where God, once again, is fully in charge of existence but where the human – the changing, mortal aspect of reality – is in no way diminished; the ego is translucent to God while participating in the unfolding drama of life.

The God versus Man dilemma is then seen to be irrelevant because Man participates willingly in the divine calling and recognises the essence of his own self in the mirror of the sacred. The path to God is no longer blocked by uncertainty and antagonism as the human vessel is properly tuned to receive spirit.