Disengaging Sacred Ideas: And Other Essays

By David Begelman Ph.D.

“Disengaging Sacred Ideas” is an anthology of essays covering such topics as religion, faith and spirituality, art, determinism and free will, synchronicity, reincarnation, Scalia’s jurisprudence, possession, witchcraft, Method technique, plague, evil, and Thorton Wilder’s Our Town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664181441

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Copyright © 2021 by David Begelman Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

The author gratefully acknowledges the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation for its kindness in permitting publication of Possession: Interdisciplinary Roots, originally published in Dissociation, Vol. VI, no. 4: December 1993.

Rev. date: 06/22/2021

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CONTENTS

Disengaging Sacred Ideas*

Art Unbound: Once More Unto the Breach

Plague, Portent and Punishment

On Synchronicity

Reincarnation: An Incoherent Doctrine?

Determinism and Free Will: Another Look

Possession: Interdisciplinary Roots

Scalia’s Jurisprudence

Witchcraft, Psychopathology, and the Faces of Johann Weyer

Thornton Wilder’s Good Old Days

Evil Redux

To all my relatives in the Lynch and Gerber clans.

Disengaging Sacred Ideas*

It’s a pleasure to be here today and share with you some thoughts I’ve had about three things usually linked together: spirituality, faith and religion. What I would like to do is disengage them, at least provisionally. That is, I should like to speak about ways in which I think the three can be, and sometimes are, kept quite separate. And I do this without being apprehensive about remarks that would be perilous to make were they voiced in the 16th or 17th century, otherwise known as the early modern era.

I mention that time-frame because some pretty horrendous things were perpetrated then in the name of spirituality, faith or religion on women alleged to be witches and persons whose ideas, practices or published writings outraged orthodoxy. In those days you’d be taking your life in your hands by saying something unpopular about spirituality or faith or religion.

One of the victims of the early modern backlash was Spinoza, a now revered figure vilified everywhere in his own day on the European continent—even by figures like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, creator of the calculus. Leibniz developed this branch of mathematics along with Isaac Newton, although quite independently of him.

Leibniz wavered over believing Spinoza had something important to say about religion, but was a bit two-faced in what he communicated to him personally, while bad-mouthing him to others behind his back. He even avoided writing to Spinoza for fear of exposure or ridicule should others access his correspondence.

In 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated by elders in his own Jewish community for his views, and was universally condemned as an Atheist, although he was far from being one. The charge was routine against anyone who challenged the orthodoxy of the day, Jewish or Christian.

Today, and to show you how much things have changed, you might risk being a target of criticism within certain academic circles for not being an Atheist! For all its growing popularity, occasional deflections from Atheism have occurred. Funnyman Henny Youngman declared that he once was on the verge of becoming an Atheist, but at the last minute changed his mind because Atheists have no holidays. Let’s start by taking a look at one of our threefold items: spirituality.

When I was younger, and had the good luck to land more theater gigs than I do these days, I had a discussion with an actress who shared the stage with me in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. She was cast in the role as Titania, and I was cast as Oberon. Once, when we had finished rehearsing, we got into discussing spirituality.

Silly me. I should have known that talking about spirituality with actors can be a pretty dicey undertaking, to say the least. Because you may start out as unsuspecting as you can be and before you know it, you’re being given a hard-sell New Age sales talk.

Anyway, the actress informed me of an important change in her life. Reflecting on her interest in the supernatural, she felt her newly acquired belief in reincarnation expressed her growing spirituality. I disagreed. I told her I didn’t see why the mere belief in a recycled life was itself any more a sign of spirituality than a belief in recycled paper products.

At that time, I believed being spiritual meant something weightier than merely believing one was a star-crossed lover, a pharaoh or a cockroach in a former life. I still do. Only now I know why I do. For me, spirituality is bound up not with what a person believes, but who one is.

These days we are witnessing a proliferation of constituencies promoting their own versions of spirituality. There are psychics who read palms or schedule séances, demonologists, clairvoyants, crystal gazers, channelers, spoon-benders, and astrologers.

My question is: is spirituality conferred for anything as trendy as ghost-hunting, divining the future, inducing trance-states at séances (without, it may be said, coming up with a smidgen of useful information to impart to the world of the living), or transforming the alleged messages of heavenly bodies like stars into truths of comparable ambiguity?

And let’s not leave the shrinks in my profession out of the mix. Does spirituality attach itself like invisible lint to those who are partial to Jung over Freud? Some of the devotees even imagine spirituality is conferred through massages or diets! Could they all be making the mistake of confusing an interest in supernaturalism, the occult or other exotic pastimes with spirituality?

And we should distinguish spirituality as I understand it from spiritualism, or the practice of communing with the dead, as inaugurated in this country by the Fox sisters in 1848. One of the sisters later admitted the sounds of departed souls were made by the girls cracking finger and toe joints within earshot of a gullible crowd.

The point to be made, of course, is not that any of the fashionable pursuits of the day are without merit. Ghost-busting in the manner of Ed and Lorraine Warren of Monroe, Connecticut might, for all we know, purge your attic of poltergeists; New Age gurus like Ram Dass, Tony Robbins, Werner Erhard or Deepak Chopra may be able to hold you spellbound until you get It (the It spelled here with a capital I). Who knows? But supposing these diversions make you more spiritual is, at least for me, simply shopping at the wrong mall. It’s as if Parsifal went searching for the Holy Grail at Tiffany’s—or on a less costly binge, at Woolworth’s.

I have a proposal to make. It’s this: we should henceforth regard spirituality as a personal characteristic harder to appropriate than a slick purchase from the marketplace of fashionable ideas. On my definition, it’s not something transacted in the agora, for the simple reason it’s not transacted at all.

You can’t appropriate spirituality—at least not my version of it—by paying a tithe, purchasing a talisman or wearing a crystal. Spirituality for me is among the highest expressions of humanity—and consequently something parceled out sparingly. It is also ecumenical. Martin Luther King, Jr. had it, as did Ann Frank. A few seemed bathed in it, as in an incandescence. In other words, they glow from the inside.

Surprisingly, spirituality for me is not an all or none affair. It can come in dosages, like medicine. St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas had it, but in my opinion the former more than the latter. Dostoyevsky had it more than Turgenev; Muhammed Ali more than Mike Tyson. Surprisingly, it can also often be discerned in the lives of quite ordinary people, especially those who maintain a quiet grace in the face of adversity, a muted courage when assailed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Even more surprising, spirituality need not have a distinctively religious cast. And here, as I indicated, being religious and being spiritual can mean two very different things. Galileo had it more than the sainted Robert Bellarmine in his dispute with the latter. Thomas Jefferson, a Deist with a belief in a retired godhead, and James Madison, who inveighed against any form of state sponsored religion, both in my opinion had it more than Torquemada, a devout Catholic.

For me, the trouble with our modern spate of contenders for the mantle of spirituality is that they imagine the virtue can be appropriated like the merchandise of street peddlers.

Spirituality seems to me to be a plainly moral attainment. Accordingly, it should have little box office appeal. It promises no cash and carry product made attractive by the vagaries of popular taste. It’s arresting when you encounter it in someone who has it in spades. So much for spirituality, at least for the way I see it. Now to faith.

The office of my primary care physician was a curious place for me to ponder what religious faith was all about, but his comments about a certain parishioner got me to thinking anew about the subject. The parishioner in question was one of my own patients I was no longer seeing on a weekly basis.

I had informed my physician that the patient (who remained anonymous) had been in steady attendance at Sunday services at a local Episcopalian church until his pastor died, at which point his interest in church attendance evaporated. The pastor’s sermons had struck a significant chord in the life of the patient; in their absence the meaning of church observance for him disappeared.

My physician registered a different note. He declared my patient should have resumed church attendance, since he insisted religious commitment should not hinge solely on a compelling aspect of sermons nor the personal appeal of a pastor, but on the faith itself. My physician felt that religious faith should mean more to a flock than the drawing power of sermons delivered by charismatic clerics.

My physician was, of course, making a point about what he thought having faith ought to mean, not what it actually is for some. There were in all likelihood parishioners who disagreed with him about what defines faith, but who nonetheless feel they haven’t abandoned it, whatever their commitment to synagogue or church attendance.

On one view of the matter, synagogue, church or mosque attendance may be merely another vehicle—and not an essential or defining one—for the realization of spiritual goals. On the other hand, maybe an inherent meaning of faith for many includes actual attendance itself. On this view, attendance is a necessary component of faith. Here, the meaning of having faith is what actual participation in group worship itself signifies.

Yet in the case of my patient, maybe it was hearing his pastor’s sermons that was at the center of his faith, not church attendance disengaged from it. If so, my physician’s attitude about attendance simply sprang from a different conception of having faith than what was in play for the patient.

A glimpse at religious history should persuade anyone that the meaning of faith for many may not coincide with what all believers construe it to be, nor how it should be practiced or fulfilled. Sometimes the matter can be serious enough to become lethal, as in past cases of heretics who went to the stake because they wouldn’t bring the is of their convictions about faith in line with the ought of official dogma. When your departure from dogma was considered heretical in the early modern period, you could wind up at the stake (in Europe), or with your head in a noose (in England and America). When the departure was successful, you might wind up starting a new creed, sect or religion. Figures like Martin Luther, the Bal Shem Tov, Brigham Young and the Buddha debuted as these kinds of innovators.

The actual history of religion itself is an unfolding saga of controversies over what defines true faith. In line with this, we might in a very schematic way designate the essential aspect of any faith as its core element and what is extraneous to it as clutter, whatever the nature of its institutional trappings. Depending upon what perspective you’re coming from, there’s authentic faith on the one hand and then there’s the bells and whistles of less foundational traditions, ceremonies or rituals on the other. Accordingly, the center of faith is one thing, while at its periphery are those historical customs of less moment.

A radically uncluttered view of faith rejects reliance on certain fashionable ideas, like, for example, the popular view of God as a booming, supervisory greybeard draped in white robes who sits atop a cloud surrounded by adoring angels. It’s a fetching picture of things popularized by Renaissance painters like Michelangelo.

But if we want to single out a representative tradition of uncluttered faith, or a bare-bones, stripped-down version of faith, one example might be the mystical tradition. Sometimes mysticism is construed as an immediate connection or union with God. But this can be tricky, because the tradition represents many different kinds of themes.

Some versions of mysticism may involve ridding consciousness of any kind of imagery when achieving the highest expression of faith, as in the Buddhist tradition. And, as William James observed in his sympathetic treatment of mystical states, it may involve other features. Among these is the ineffability or indescribability of the mystical experience, reportedly a state for which no adequate description can be articulated or verbalized.

The tradition began in the East in Hinduism and Buddhism and makes an appearance in later religious systems like the Kabbalah in Judaism, or Meister Eckhart in Christianity. Papal ears went up when this Dominican churchman wrote We are totally transformed into God and changed into Him.

The mystical tradition most of the time involves a separation of believers from the godhead: a type of dualism. At other times it celebrates a union with God, as in the Eastern tradition. Most of the time however, separation of God from the believer prevails across the Judeo-Christian mystical landscape of faith.

There are Judaic practices that sharpen the dualistic version of faith. A custom serving to memorialize separation form God is the wearing of the yarmulke. While this practice among branches of Judaism varies, going from a sign of piety as a discretionary option, to an obligatory practice, it nonetheless commemorates God’s presence above us, and therefore his separation from us.

The optional aspect of wearing yarmulkes has been favored more by Sephardic communities, while its obligatory character is more a hallmark of Ashkenazic and Hasidic communities. But the central feature of separation from God is not only a universal thread in Judaism, it is also characteristic of forms of Jewish mysticism, like Kabbalah or the earlier Merkabah, a system inspired by the Book of Ezekial, the celebratory theme of which was redemption.

There are rarer instances in Judaism of a union with God in which separation from him dissolves, as in the case of Isaac of Acre, a kabbalist who wrote about the soul being absorbed into God as a jug of water dissolves into a running well. Then there was R. Schneur Zalman, who wrote about persons as drops of water dissolved into an infinite ocean with only an illusory sense of individuality. But these were exceptions to the rule.

A flavor of this absence of a separation from God surfaces in Spinoza, accounting for why he was excommunicated by elders in his own religious community. By the way, the mystic needn’t be a religious figure—witness Plotinus, a third century Egyptian philosopher who was influenced by the Indian mystical tradition.

At any rate, the history of mysticism is one that usually marks a cleavage between the believer and God or less frequently, union with Him (often expressed as immanence of Him in everything, including the believer).

Christian mystics, like Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, were cases in which those celebrities ran the risk of heresy to the extent their mystical experiences were seen as private or unions with, rather than devotion to, and therefore separation from, God. This was a typical pitfall for Christian mystics.

Of course, Teresa of Avila herself ran other risks. First, as a spokesperson for an innovative view on faith, she was a woman, a lesser status in her day for would-be reformers. Second, her paternal grandfather was a converso, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism in order to escape expulsion or death at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. This institution in Spain was in fact founded in 1478 on the need to detect Jews who, despite their conversion to Catholicism, were practicing Judaism