hermit's thatch

The etymology of the word “hermit” is suggestive for more than just linguistic interest. The Greek term eremos refers to desolate spaces, and the eremite is one who goes into that solitary expanse, usually thought of as a desert. And perhaps the desert image is an appropriate one in offering a physical landscape with little redeeming value compared to forest, valley, or mountain (let alone city); the desert image also describes the psychology of a soul bereft of comfort from the world — the situation of the solitary in his or her first ventures into solitude.

Eremitism savors the paradoxical and contrary, as opposed to contradictory. Eremos is desolate in the physical sense, poor and simple in aesthetics versus the rich complexities of the city or palaces of the world. Yet desolation is what characterizes the grand places in their spiritual sterility. So “desolate” places takes on two meanings. The hermit reaches out across the centuries to other like-minded sages, never alone, never “desolate.” Never as alone and “desolate” as the soulless who inhabit the palaces and splendid places.

In physical eremos, solitude is the telling characteristic about the person, without reference to intellectual or psychological content of that one who enters it. In early Christianity (nor later), the hermit was not a consecrated religious; the content of his or her calling was not regulated. The hermit did not have to conform to institutional standards. What, after all, could be expected of the hermit who enters desolate space?

The ancient hermit was not only not consecrated, but not even authorized, to enter eremos. The hermit was not living a sanctioned office, nor even living a socially acceptable life by the standards of his contemporaries, for Christianity emphasizes duty and social service.

Rather, the hermit is a rebel, but not a revolutionary. The hermit does not intend to overturn institutions but to check them and assert contrary values. The hermit expresses dissatisfaction with both secular and religious contemporaries, with their practices and pretenses. This rebellion may be expressed, at first, involuntarily, circumstantial, accidental. For example, in St. Jerome’s little portrait of Paul, the supposedly first Christian hermit, Paul hardly set out to be a hermit. He was simply fleeing a wave of persecution in his city and was betrayed by his brother-in-law as a Christian.

His brother-in-law conceived the thought of betraying the youth whom he was bound to conceal. Neither a wife’s tears which so often prevail, nor the ties of blood, nor the all-seeing eye of God above him could turn the traitor from his wickedness. He came, he was urgent, he acted with cruelty while seeming only to press the claims of affection. The young man had the tact to understand this, and, conforming his will to the necessity, fled to the mountain wilds to wait for the end of the persecution.

Paul fled for a practical reason, involuntarily. But we may extrapolate the situation of historical hermits who reclused themselves for political safety (as in ancient China) or as in Paul’s case. We can extrapolate from a precipitating cause to a reflecting upon what the continual danger of society, authority, and state represented to the individual’s values. Not the value of self-preservation only — though this may be the only motive initially, as in Paul’s case. All the historical hermits eventually reflect upon their situation and come to realize that flee they must, flee into eremos, into a place where the world does not follow because it does not extend its values and win back the hermit.

Jerome’s introduction has not the promise of eremitism but involuntary solitude — and mere eremos, desolate space. The desolation is in physical space and psychological alienation. But Jerome suspends the story of Paul for that of Anthony, who takes the readers’ place as one curious to see how someone can successfully be a hermit. And Jerome offers no details or how-to, only the wonderful dialog ensuing when Anthony finds Paul.

Paul lives in a cave, which he barricades against the sound of an intruder in the night. At the cave entry, Anthony beseeches Paul with pleas and tears. Paul opens at last, realizing that the pleas are genuine. He asks Anthony if he realizes that he has come here to die, so far from anything hospitable is this eremos. But likewise of himself, Paul says:

Behold the man whom you have sought with so much toil, his limbs decayed with age, his gray hairs unkempt. You see before you a man who before long will be dust.

Among historical hermits of Asia, for example, to enter a mountain or forest was to be as if dead, dead to the world. The Hindu forest dweller or forest hermit was not permitted to partake of foods or products from villages, things cultivated by the labor of other than self and nature. This was faith in the providence of nature or the divine to find means sufficient to life, life always teetering on the brink of extinction. The practices of historical hermits like eschewing common foods, warm clothing, conventional shelter, sleep, or the comfort of hearth and companionship, are like archetypes for “how-to.” These methods are crowned with the hermits’ own cultural method of meditation.

Jerome’s narrative then puts into Paul’s mouth what is emblematic eremitism:

Tell me therefore, I pray you, how fares the human race? Are new homes springing up in the ancient cities? What government directs the world? Are there still some remaining for the demons to carry away by their delusions?”

Every generation deems its own times worst, and only a successive generation can apply a material measurement to its predecessor’s claim. T.S. Eliot described a post-World War I world as a “wasteland,” and yet the decades since have seen only worsening material and social conditions. Surely a material measurement today is not a measure of how things are at present but a projection of how they may become in the future. With the collapse of globalization, the onset of global warming, the acceleration of peak energy, and the legacy of destructive technology, the possibilities project to a far worse future than present.

Yet the times are what any individual can make of them; they are whatever comes out of the heart of a person right here and now. The solitary knows that the world is going to be what it is going to be, and that is why the solitary has gone out of it, and lives as if it is the worst as it is now, and will be the worst as it is then.

“How fares the human race?” asks Paul rhetorically, and we of a later generation know that nothing has changed, that it fares the same — except, perhaps, a material increment, a sophistication of contrivance, a collectivized destruction of mind and heart by the idea of progress and clinging delusion over the centuries, all waiting to be “carried away,” as Paul puts it in his own vocabulary.

The solitary may not enter solitude voluntarily, but eventually the condition of solitude imparts a wisdom that no social group can. Solitude strips away the layers that separate us from the raw condition of being.

We may see the desert of eremitism as a desolation, but the historical hermit saw society and the world as the desolation.

Plainness of soul and aspiration are best reflected in eremos, in the places eschewed by the world for their lack of excitement and glamor. The sad destruction of the very physical places reveals the profound ignorance of the worldly. These places are destroyed because the busy people, the ambitious and worldly, never see beyond the veil that separates them from themselves. The veil remains, unwittingly, shielding them from the desolation that is within them, shielding them from the eremos of their very selves.

Of the mental disorders identified with solitaries (see last entry), the broad brush of schizoid is often applied. The DSM-IV describes Schizoid Personality Disorder (301.20) as

a pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings.

The individuals with this disorder

appear to lack a desire for intimacy, seem indifferent to opportunities to develop close relationships, and do not seem to derive much satisfaction from being part of a family or other social group. They prefer spending time by themselves, rather than being with other people. They often appear to be socially isolated or “loners” and almost always choose solitary activities or hobbies that do not include interaction with others. They prefer mechanical or abstract tasks .. and take pleasure in few, if any activities.

A broad brush indeed! A brushstroke that paints introverts as a class, with no particular concession to the legitimacy of an inner life, just a certain dull insensitivity viewed from without.

Disorder must be linked to dysfunction. Only more specific criteria can begin to demonstrate this. But what to make of the advanced criteria?

• “indifferent to approval or criticism of others and do not appear to be bothered by what others may think of them”
• “oblivious to the normal subtleties of social interaction and … social cues … without visible emotional reactivity”
• “rarely experience strong emotions such as anger and joy … appear cold and aloof.”

The DSM-IV goes to lengths to distinguish these behaviors from similar ones during depression and related mood disorders, personality disorders, and disorders prompted by substance use. “Individuals who are ‘loners’ may display personality traits that might be considered schizoid. Only when these traits are inflexible and maladaptive and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute Schizoid Personality Disorder.”

With Schizotypal Personality Disorder (301.22), the criteria tightens, and here we see the traditional solitary and the schizoid part ways from the schizotypal. In fact the behaviors become focused on the external world far more than the Schzoid. Characteristics include pursuit of an assumed paranormal power, secret idiosyncratic language, paranoia, eccentricity in circumstances that are outside the social or public context (such as dress or manners). The DSM-IV tacks on the usual indifference to social relations, but distinguishes between the awkward introvert and the agitated schizotypal.

This is not a large population. In fact, over half of schizotypals have a concurrent depression, complicating diagnosis. Only 3% of the population is schizotypal, and of that even fewer cases actually develop into psychotic symptoms of paranoia, delusion or true schizophrenia. Most of the cases have a clear genetic or hereditary correlation. Though not mentioned, every introvert can probably cite environmental factors in upbringing. Perhaps the schizotypal does not have such factors in their upbringing because they are genetic, not environmental.

Psychohistory identifies historical personalities by observing psychological characteristics. Major figures like Hitler and Luther have been traditional objects of scrutiny, and various mystics, gurus, and creative personalities likewise lend themselves to typing. We can easily try to type mystics and high-profile solitaries like Simon Stylites, let’s say, but the game is futile when we look at the self-effacing profile of the historical hermit, especially in terms of culture.

Of course, how a person came to be a hermit is grist for the psychological mill, and the conjectures have their place. But the solitary has a more compelling motive for solitude than the psychiatric or the dysfunctional. Or certainly should. Understanding the self is part of weaving together the mesh of a philosophy of solitude that encompasses all aspects of reality, including discussions of personality.

Medicine, like science in general, attempts to classify behaviors into patterns, and patterns into syndromes, disorders, and ultimately into diseases. Thus the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) has at one time or another in a person’s life, everybody’s number — literally. Presumably the exception is all those who are normal and all-wise from birth, with ideal parents, environment, and world, to the point of perfection as average and having no outstanding behavioral characteristics. Which is impossible.

The solitary personality has been nicely defined by Oldham, who rightly stresses that every so-called personality is a cluster of behaviors that we cite for convenience sake but that they are all normal behaviors, simply within the range of how people are.

Only with dysfunctional behavior do we look back and see how dysfunction is itself an exaggeration or abuse of originally normal behaviors. Thus the solitary, at the extreme of dysfunction or mental disorder, is schizoid. The ideal solitary (if such exists) is an ideal set of traits. The real solitary is checkered with presumed disorders from childhood that linger. What the real solitary needs to do is embrace their self, work honestly with their characteristics, and find the transcendent dimension that transfers their insights into values. That is another dimension to personality that, however, does not fall within the capacity of medicine as diagnosis and prescription.

(My favorite fact usefully described in Oldham is this: contrary to the popular view of the solitary personality as depressive, due to introversion, reticence or preferences for being alone, it is the extrovert who is more prone to depression due to dependence on feedback from the external world of people and things.)

Medicine has the tendency to aggregate symptoms and label them a disease, when, in fact, the symptoms may have entirely separate etiologies, and may be treated separately. This is especially the case with bodily disorders, where part of the tendency of modern medicine is to fit a pharmaceutical to a disease — which it cannot do if treating symptoms alone. Ironically, the cure or prescription is usually treating only a cluster of symptoms, not a disease, at least not until the outstanding characteristic of the disease establishes itself irrefutably.

Two “disorders” associated with the solitary personality (at least in the DSM-IV, not in Oldham) are “Social Phobia or Social Anxiety Disorder” and “Avoidant Personality Disorder.” The DSM has our number, literally: Social Anxiety Disorder is 300.23 and Avoidant Personality Disorder is 301.82 in its classification of mental disorders. The first is a phobia, and the second is a personality disorder.

The diagnostic features of social anxiety disorder are intended for physicians but are certainly of interest to the lay person in seeing how authorities judge behaviors. For example, it is cautioned that the fear of social or performance situations must be dysfunction for the individual, incapacitating them from regular functions. A preference for not eating in public, or being judged and criticized, or worrying in advance of a social event are features.

Individuals with Social Phobia … may manifest poor social skills (e.g., poor eye contact) or observable signs of anxiety (e.g., cold clammy hands, tremors, shaky voice). [They] … often have decreased social support networks and are less likely to marry. [They may] have no friends, … completely refrain from dating, or remain with their family of origin.

There are warnings about suicide and associated disorders like Anxiety Disorders, Mood Disorders, and Substance-Related Disorders.

At least the manual notes that

Fears of being embarrassed in social situations are common, but usually the degree of distress or impairment is insufficient to warrant a diagnosis of Social Phobia.

That, coming from authorities, is intended to the inadvertent layperson-reader as a solace.

Allusion is made to Korea and Japan for cultural context, but nowhere else. The term hikimoro does not occur (it not being clinical, presumably). The range of 3% to 13% of the general population are sufferers of Social Phobia. The conclusion is made that there are no laboratory tests to demonstrate the condition, and that without the presence of other mental disorders, there is not much to be done.

Another characteristic disorder of the solitary is Avoidant Personality Disorder, defined as

a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation …

Usually this disorder is identifiable from early in life with schooling, right on through work. Such people bristle at disapproval, criticism, or suggestion. Says DSM-IV:

They tend to be shy, quiet, inhibited, and “invisible” because of the fear that any attention would be degrading or rejecting.

In contrast to social phobics, the avoidant persons “often vigilantly appraise the movements and expressions of those with whom they come into contact,” essentially out of fear. They have low self-esteem, and like the social phobics, no social network. Again, like social phobia, there are related disorders usually present to warrant the diagnosis of dysfunction.

About .5% to 1% of the general population can be labeled as having Avoidant Personality Disorder. Only in the last lines of this section of the DSM-IV do the authors acknowledge that

Many individuals display avoidant personality traits. Only when these traits are inflexible, maladaptive, and persisting and causing significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute Avoidant Personality Disorder.

Reading the DSM-IV can engender hypochondria, paranoia, or fear that one is losing one’s mind. There are enough problems in life that demand our coping. But, further, we can be aware that the behaviors we inherit from childhood are being vigilantly classified by medical authorities. Of course, such awareness on our part is necessary, and on the part of science if science is to attain its goal of complete knowledge of all empirical phenomena, with dubious probability of attaining this. But psychiatry and pharmaceuticals are, after all, industries. They require clients and consumers. We should purchase only what we need, enough to feed ourselves, correct ourselves, become more conscious of ourselves.

And for that we can find psychiatric research useful. But no more than philosophical or psychological or spiritual work, which can take us as far or further, rightly understood. We need to go the distance with both, but no further in the case of allopathic medicine and the perilous divide between a self as bundle of behaviors and a self as fully realized.

What science writer John Horgan calls rational mysticism (the title of his 2003 book, Rational Mysticism) is a set of tentative alternatives to historical forms of mysticism: religious, spiritual, philosophical, aesthetic, and natural. (There may be other forms.) The very effort to find alternatives shows the enduring attraction of alternative states of consciousness, even when the aspiration is not entirely legitimate.

Horgan pursues scientists’ assessments of mysticism as either brain chemistry, physiology, or self-delusion. Diehard “ultramaterialists” dominate the scientific opinions of spirituality. Expeditions to disprove or unmask claims to mysticism preoccupy the parallel thinkers — atheists — obsessively dependent upon the existence of religious fundamentalism or the simplicity of less intelligent believers easily mocked and discarded. It is a symbiosis.

But religious thinking is not easily disposed. Bypassing the content of religions, materialists and scientists propose the psychological and physiological argument that the brain is hard-wired to be gullible, wishful, and delusional. When Freud attacked religion as an “illusion” his arguments were respectably philosophical and psychological as much as cultural, but he did not imagine a device like a “meme.” The “meme” has become the code word for a kind of mental virus, easily disposed to being used against whatever one happens not to like.

Harder it is to dispose of James Austin’s famous pursuit of Zen and the brain because his notion of mysticism — if it is really mysticism — differs from the Western one, despite Austin being a scientist. To many Westerners, mysticism is still ecstasy and pleasure, the eroticism of the biblical Song of Songs, Teresa of Avila, or Rumi. Or Horgan’s seekers are just looking for fun (he even calls it “the problem of fun”), a substitute for the above-mentioned mysticism substituting a light show.

Ironically, the pursuers of rational mysticism in Horgan’s chapters are testing the stereotype of Western mysticism against the cool measurements of reason and science. They are a little frightened of Zen (and Eastern) vocabulary of formlessness, void, and emptiness. So they back-peddle to the problem of fun, falling short of any comprehension of subjective experience. They turn to drugs.

Albert Hofmann created LSD in 1943, but the use of intoxicants and mind-altering substances has been a cultural feature since the dawn of human beings, probably starting with shamans and co-opted by the average person seeking wine, created by God (as the biblical Psalm puts it) “to gladden the heart.” And that has been the postmodern difference. The shift to pharmaceuticals (whether LSD or DMT or brewed fungi and plant poisons, the highbrow choice versus abused pharmaceuticals) shows the intervention of science to essentially find devices to control the minds of others, as much as to entertain the select.

Pharmaceuticals have been used, like nuclear radiated material, to justify helping the few and destroying the many, granting enormous cultural power to elites. In this light, the scientific search for a chemical (not “rational”) mysticism has a darker side than just brain chemistry. As I write, the use of pharmaceuticals to treat populations from children to soldiers reveals the inimical nature of the mind-altering agenda, however naive the earliest takers may have been.

What the hallucinogens do is to reveal not a mystical world but an artificial world that takes the predispositions of the psyche and distorts them into either heightened fear or heightened visuals. Horgan recalls his use of ayahuasca as revealing colorful geometric shapes and a sharpened lunar presence on an etched nighttime landscape, perhaps a mental equivalent of staring at the sun or putting on a sharper pair of lenses (“Better with or without? Better now or … now?”).

What all of these seekers have sought, but usually refused to admit, is that they crave the mystical experience of the conventional religious and spiritual mystics — on their own terms. Perhaps they have craved the experiences of Teresa and Rumi more than of the sublime Eckhart or John of the Cross, and found them absent in their own lives. Of course, they would reject the premises of how such mystics enter their states, and that is entirely their perogative. Yet the parallels are suggestive. The desire for mysticism, for a leaving of nature and the mundane, for an indefinite state of ecstatic exuberance is unmistakable.

In turn, this desire is fed by a more fundamental desire to understand the nature of the universe, and here is common ground. As the subtitle of Horgan’s book hopefully frames it: “spirituality meets science in the search for enlightenment.” But enlightenment eludes science as much as it eludes spirituality, with the exception that spirituality knows where not to look. And this is where science and rational mysticism will have to find common ground in nature, to look at nature for patterns, not laws, for insights, not reasons, for glimpses not revelations.

The author and others will have to abandon “the problem of fun,” as Horgan puts it in his last effort to salvage the utility of drugs — which one suspects is the chief motive of advocates of drugs — and just abandon the concept of a problem. Useful, too, will be to look eastward for the calm and equanimity that transcends the tumult of ecstasy while never really transcending the universe of which we are a part, and which is as much ours to treasure as to transcend.

Popular media actually does a fair job at distinguishing hermits and recluses according to a classical definition — meaning the definition of dictionaries and of historical usage versus popular culture. Thus, when an older person suffering a neurosis (or worse), who stays indoors and barely knows his or her environs, dies alone, the media will usually and correctly call that person a recluse.

Someone living alone or even with others, quietly going about their business, conscious of their environs, others, the trajectory of their lives, but fitting the solitary personality type, comes close to being a solitary, or in classical terms, a hermit.

Sometimes the term will be used interchangeably in popular media. A browse through news stories on Hermits … around the web will offer up examples. Usually, we can tell the difference in a glance.

Hermits are consciously crafting their lives according to some principle, belief, or viewpoint. The popular image is endearing but a stereotype — meaning one does see it all of the time! The reputation for grumpiness or cantankerousness follows from the expectation that maximum latitude should be given by others. Eccentric ideas and habits stir the mix. How does the media distinguish a hermit or a recluse if newspapers are stacked to the ceiling in their house, or they wear a long beard or unkempt hair? Is Diogenes really the prototype hermit, the archetype of the Waite tarot card? Maybe the definition for “crabbiness” was based on 17th-century English hermit Roger Crab? (Well, no, the OED says 1580 — but the Merriam-Webster does illustrate the use of “crabby” with: “a crabby recluse.”)

Most of the modern focus on the justification of solitude is based on two important points: 1) aesthetics and 2) psychology.

The true hermit can try to guide life by spiritual, religious or aesthetic ideals. A lived eremitism adds the unique experience of physical solitude — really social solitude. This experience can add a view of nature and wilderness that captures the two aspects of an argument for a philosophy of solitude. Eremitism can transform nature and wilderness into a spiritual reflection of our physical solitude, in part because the profound absence of consciousness (or better, self-consciousness) impresses us, we humans with the debilitation that consciousness seems to dog us with. Additionally, nature and wilderness resist anthropomorphism, and the solitary learns early on that nature and wilderness are as caught up by mysterious forces as we are, and is no enemy, no antagonism, nothing but peace, fearlessness, and silence.

From this observation of nature, we can apply our minds to what resonates about certain aspects of nature, and bring them to our own contrivances (art, language, symbols, emotions, technology) to compare. The solitary will safeguard the self’s apparent structure, but is free to invite the input of nature in order to see where ideas and feelings lead.

Hence the whole idea of simplicity is no more than the confluence of our human contrivances meeting aspects of nature that can resonate with our basic instincts and values. The solitary always has the potential for a more intrinsic simplicity simply because most of what is complex and contrived is for social purposes. Who would create for oneself parlor art, fashion, pulp writing, techno-gadgets, if these are going to stay in one’s room? Everything mass-made and mass-marketed is for social interaction. Solitaries do take up eccentric hobbies and pastimes that no one every sees or shares, but in their hearts, these hobbyists know that these are substitutes for life, time-killers that amuse and no more. The challenge is to make of them an expression of aesthetics that resonates with solitude, that projects our being, that thrusts us into a place of knowing. Reading can do that, and practices can do that, and art can do that, and listening, too. But let us not busy ourselves so much that we forget to look out the window, that we do not go out and draw water and chop wood, as the saying goes.

The wise hermit is meticulous, artful, subjectively introverted, but not neurotic.

Neurotics is exactly what recluses are. At least that is the definition that can be proposed to distinguish hermits and solitaries from recluses. Neurotics do not create philosophies of life. They do not contemplate the eternal lessons of nature and wilderness, monitor the interaction of nature and culture to achieve the right expression of spirit. Neurotics are fearful of others, even while wanting others to do something for them — obey, command, sympathize, serve them. The hermit — the true solitary — no longer wants anything from anybody, but feels free to talk, counsel, listen, accept, and exchange.

The greatest hermits of every culture — Europe, China, Russia, India, etc. — have always had time to counsel others, as did the Christian desert hermits, the Russian starets, or the forest-dwellers of South Asia. They could give of themselves so much because it was easily replenished. Their sharing was not charity, social work, or duty but a form of enlightenment for themselves as much as for others, as when a candle lights another candle and its flame is not diminished. If one can have this relationship to everyone, then our solitude would be mature and lasting, not broken by pulls of passion.

Social relations for the solitary then become a kind of aesthetics in that every soul has to one degree or another a kind of beauty or wisdom to offer, but no more. Like art, conversation for the solitary is guided by a careful touch of paint here or sculpting there — images not so much of language but art, making our words and thoughts making portraits of reality, not emptiness, jocularity, and time-wasting.

Aesthetics governs words and the economy of ideas that reflects simplicity of soul. We complicate our thoughts with too many intentions to cover too many realities, when in fact the simple is best, and always leads back to nature. Nature is assertive but never wasteful, sometimes understated but never contrived. Like nature, so our social relationship ought to be.

The solitary does well to consider aesthetics and nature as building-blocks to a philosophy of life and the structure of eremitism. In this we already have ready-made much of culture to sift and consider. The task is one of simplifying, until that which is crafted to our best abilities can emerge. Nor do we lose our self in the bargain. We develop as much “ego” as we need in order to then discard it, replacing ego with the work of art that we have made of our lives. And this, by anyone’s standard, will make for a quiet and understated but forceful presence in the world, or rather, the little world in which we find ourselves. The traditional “recluse” — the one cited for those who exhibit strange anti-social behavior by the popular media — will not be able to do this. The recluse will have little to do with the true hermit, who loves solitude but also everything in the world that is natural, simple, and true.

The last entry touched upon weaknesses in Huston Smith’s Why Religion Matters: not so much his opposition to scientism but his broad reaction to contemporary institutions and ideas without any historical consideration of how they got the way they are, no apparent interest in the sources of the modern and postmodern world views that he dislikes. As a long-time proponent of the perennial view of religious values, Smith vigorously defends perennial thought, but he targets the wrong issues.

For all that, Smith concludes, endearingly, about deciding between the theist (“There is one God”) Beatific Vision and the mystic (“There is only God”) union. He quotes Ramakrishna: “I want to taste sugar, not be sugar.” Smith muses that, after all, there will come a time when everyone will have forgotten Huston Smith, and he will feel like packing it all up. That’s where the mystical alternative will be available.

Smith’s journey has been a rather long one from the dubious days in the early sixties when he invested credence in entheogenic drugs such as mescaline and ayahuasca and later (like Aldous Huxley) became a staunch advocate of perennial philosophy. The perennial seeks to salvage the best of each religion and identify their trajectories as the same or similar enough to be tolerated and respected. This view edges close to assuming that content is the same, and one or another religion is the same, at least in good will and spiritual configuration.

Perhaps a broad similarity of teleology among the world’s religions is as far as anyone can take the pursuit of truth, but the view has the unintended consequence of relativizing the social and material conditions that give rise to particular religious forms — exactly the error that Smith makes in his arguments against scientism. Moreover, the relativizing affects the beliefs themselves, conflating the personalities of prophets and founders, or of ceremonies and sounds. Smith’s wrong path would be in blaming scientism for loss of the traditional view, but the traditional view came about under specific circumstances, and is hard to retain intact over centuries of change, especially recent centuries. Postmoderns point this out. Science is not alone in the flow of ideas in this process of cultural and societal change. The error is in not seeing the whole context of society, culture, and expression that engenders the particular religion — and science, too.

John Horgan, in his book Rational Mysticism, spends his first chapters discussing Huston Smith, postmodernism and mysticism. The postmodern distrusts both the traditional worldview and modern optimism. It deconstructs experience in order to identify the roots of institutions and finds the beginning of the trajectory to what has happened up to today. Nietzsche foreshadowed this work in his Genealogy of Morals, tracing back in time and history what culture presents rather than accepting culture’s definitions, which are themselves products of culture’s elites. With postmodernism, one is still working with culture’s elites, of course. The postmodern edginess may seem like an academic exercise, a chess game back at the faculty club, not always a real encounter with society. But how else can we understand why things change and why they benefit the powerful?

Another journalist, Peter Trachtenberg in his book The Book of Calamities, is compelling, evocative, and thoughtful. His subtitle is “Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning.” Such an angle can take in traditional to postmodern views while keeping a strong hold on the real issue: suffering. Whether one finds solace — read “meaning” — in the traditional view (suffering as punishment, karma, divine mystery) or the postmodern view (the absurd, chaos, chance, mystery), the modern view of infinite progress and optimism is largely unmasked.

Trachtenberg offers a compilation of anecdotes intermingled with reflections. His first-hand experiences drive the authenticity of the questions. He personally spoke with genocide victims in Rwanda, tsunami victims in Sri Lanka, an innocent man on Texas death row, twin sisters suffering from a rare skin disorder that would kill them at 27, Vietnam War veterans still unhealed from war trauma, a female colleague at the office dying of cancer, the Andrea Yates prosecutor, and a blustery failed writer who never gets around to organizing his life or ambitions and kills himself.

Trachtenberg downplays his own 20-year long heroin addiction, now that he is clean. And along the way, he dips into the significance of suffering in the classic texts: Gilgamesh, Job, Oedipus, Polycarp (the prototype early Christian martyr), Buddha, Boethius, Victor Frankl, Simone Weil.

The questions are “Why me?” “How Do I Endure?” “What is Just?” “What Does MY Suffering Say About Me? … About God?” and “What Do I Owe Those Who Suffer?” There are no concrete answers, of course, no satisfying insights, but a panoply to awaken our sensitivities. Suffering as punishment or as nature makes for psychological sleights-of-hand, but the reign of chaos over order is so unrelenting in the world that the questions become rhetorical or unspoken. Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist in the Nazi death camps, found himself grasping for bits of pleasure (the recalled passages of a scholarly paper or the lucky bottom scraps of a pot of soup with a few peas in it) — these gave not so much pleasure as meaning. Simone Weil fasted in solidarity with those who suffered, and probably died from it. Boethius found himself imprisoned by those he had loyally served, and spun out his essay “On Consolation” in order to grasp for stability, no longer concerned about vindicating himself, any more than Job did, who was feisty enough to argue with God but then just gave it up, as if to answer “whatever,” still clearly unsatisfied with the idea that suffering is simply a mystery to be endured, as Yahweh insisted.

And so we look outside of ourselves, and shake our heads at the world’s penchant for increasing the suffering of others; we look within our societies and communities and see self-destruction in the habits of all from the simple-minded to the wealthy around us. The Buddha’s image of a wheel is appropriate: one must stop the wheel from turning, that’s all. But suffering makes the wheel go on without us, without our intentionality, our good will, our hopes — and one ends up suffering mentally, on behalf of others, within. The wheel turns, and who is available to stop it? Where the modern was optimistic, the postmodern is not — the traditional world view fluctuated between optimism and pessimism because it could not fathom the mystery, lacking the consciousness of what has unfolded as history. But consciousness does not spell insight, and we are left blind to meaning, unless we consume ourselves with some social task to accomplish, a fatal activism — or turn to solitude.

Solitude tries to rescue the only self that it can reach, the only self that can be worked on. The bodhisattva image, so persuasive in masters from Shantideva to Bassui, does not relieve suffering as such, only the mind, so that suffering does not dominate our thoughts, our senses, our cells. That is a half measure. One lifetime is not enough to work on that many souls, barely enough time to work on oneself. No, there just isn’t enough time, let alone energy. We are left quite alone in the work of fathoming that still point that mysticism is fond of, that point so lofty and sublime that suffering is viewed as simply change and randomness that we look at as if from afar rather than felt as real pain.

Despite Huston Smith’s firm reputation in popularizing religion and distinguishing spirituality from its institutional counterparts, Smith’s book Why Religion Matters is disappointing. The book is not really about “the fate of the human spirit in an age of disbelief,” as the subtitle suggests. The book rails against modern and postmodern thinking (in contrast to “traditional” thought) without explaining or examining how things got this way. And lacking this explanation makes too much of what Smith says sound like a reactionary screed.

The configuration of traditional (what used to be called, simplistically, the “age of belief”), modern (Enlightenment to the 20th century, more or less) and postmodern, is generally accepted. While the first two eras are extensivety covered most anywhere else, the three cumulative levels of postmodern are here usefully summarized: 1. minimalist (“we have no maps and don’t know how to make them”), 2. mainline (” … and never again will we have a consensual worldview”) and 3. hardcore (” … and good riddance!”).

But Smith spends most of his time complaining, not explaining. He describes the modern view as tunnel vision, with four sides of the tunnel being scientism, academia, the media, and the legal system. These are conservative themes dangerously bordering on fundamentalist politics and social views, only in part dealing with religion. Yet Smith has never been a reactionary. It is rather his conservative view of religion that seems to pull him into a camp that may include rather secular-minded agendas by people hostile toward his religious agenda but willing to change institutions to fit their own. These are the perils of Smith’s own tunnel vision.

If Smith was confident in the staying power, the perennial nature of the heart of religious thought, he would be confident that it can last or outlast any era of skepticism or estrangement. But his shrill tone in the book of a proponent of reconciling perspectives on culture and ideas lands his thoughts next to unsavory books on the same shelf.

The problem is that Smith does not look at historical factors that would explain the evolution of Western thought. Why did science emerge in the first place, why did reason and philosophy overturn belief, what social and material factors in early modern and modern times overwhelmingly changed society and daily life, how did world wars, genocide, totalitarianism, and atomic bombs conspire to promote postmodernism?

Taking these into account, Smith would understand that religion does not exist in a vacuum, that it is a cultural expression and must be seen in a social, even anthropological, light. Additionally, the fate of a religion (he is thinking almost exclusively of his own Christianity in this book) is bound to the fate of the people who profess it. The character of the West has been progressive revealed or unmasked in the modern and postmodern eras, especially to the rest of the world. Is its religion no more than an appendage of its centuries of conquest and imperialism? Perhaps Smith is bound to be sensitive about this issue, for his parents were missionaries in China. But it is astonishing to read his snide remarks about the gullible Chinese.

From this issue can be extrapolated the obvious details of how modernity has changed the world. The changes to academia or media may bother Smith, but not modernity’s economics, or wars, or technology? What about other institutions: pharmaceuticals, agri-business, chemicals, aeronautics? Traditional beliefs were overthrown by such secular material forces as much as by universities or mass market media, which are merely their echoes.

In the second part of the book, Smith offers another quick generalization: “spiritual personality types.” These categories have their use, but they are not allowed to intersect or overflow, which is exactly what modernity and post-modernity sees, contrary to Smith. His types are 1. the atheist (“there is no god”), 2. the polytheist (“there are many gods”), 3. the monotheist (“there is one God”), and the mystic (“there is only God”). Here Smith is somewhat better grounds, but his relentless samples of proofs are not adequate, representing only anecdotal evidence. Just because someone says something does not make it so.

Another reason to skim (if not skip) the book is Smith’s ubiquitous name-dropping. He is too facile in bringing up conversations with famous people, to quick and frequent in mentioning “when I was at MIT” or Harvard, or Standford, or elsewhere.

Perhaps it is a penchant in old age to ease off the analysis and simply remember that it worked once upon a time. Indeed, Smith was one of fascinating and curious Western eclectics who studied Zen in a Japanese Zen monastery and studied Hinduism with an Indian yogi and threw himself into experimenting with hallucinogens with Timothy Leary in an era when it was still not popular. Of his many hours with Bill Moyers, one best remember the Tibetan Buddhist mandala on the wall of his Berkeley home.

So Smith has done great service in promoting an understanding or appreciation of the many paths of spirituality. That is why Why Religion Matters is either not representative of Smith or not representative of how to address the topic posed by the title.

Pantheism is optimism in divinity, shattering the supernatural into infinite fragments in order to account for creation. Pantheism is enthusiasm in nature, not as rational or flawed design, not even viewing nature sub specie aeterni, but just because there is nothing above or eternal, and everything below is good.

Pantheism does not see every creature animated by spirits — either as animism or as Jain or Druidic panentheism — nor does it distinguish the divine substance from that which is impermanent. Sharman Apt Russell, in her popularizing book Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist, initially identifies pantheism with the creed of Marcus Aurelius, but Stoicism did not go so far as to interest itself in metaphysics.

Pantheism simply identifies God as being equivalent to everything, not in or behind or mingled with. Pantheism is the initial attempt to reconcile divinity to empiricism. It opens a detente to the philosophy of science — except that science responds by killing the theos even before the love of the natural world can get so far along as to grant divinity to nature.

For what is the point of divinizing nature except to add awe and wonder to the experience? Unsentimental science easily wields Ockham’s razor against pantheism as a cosmology, as one more theism. Yet the awe and wonder remain. Who can refute the divinity of nature, the awe of viewing the spectacle as all there is, really all?

But that is an abstraction, enjoyed by those who either know no suffering or have gotten past it. At such points, however, one is no longer within pantheism. And the argument is not a pressing one but makeshift, for we have seen into things by then. Pantheism is simply a label for the experience of wonder, not a description of anything either empirical or metaphysical.

If we add divinity to nature and pursue wonder as a kind of rational mysticism, we remain in the realm of aesthetics, positing an aesthetics of nature that we call divine. Granted, we achieve one of Plato’s virtues: the Beautiful. But we are at the lowest rung of his triumvirate that includes the Good and the True. And how is the Beautiful to even approach the other two if everything is finished and complete with the Beautiful?

We have not far to go to dissuade ourselves that nature is not all beautiful, even as perennial philosophers, looking at all the pain and suffering, still insist that everything is good, everything is right, just as it is. Pantheism tries to provide an explanation for this latter point of view. Everything is alright because everything is divine. It’s not even that some things are alright because some things have got divinity within them, while others don’t seem to. How can anything be left out? replies pantheism. Whatever is not good is just our puny minds and hearts unable to perceive that it is.

Traditional theism accounts for suffering with temporality and eternity. Non-theistic thought like Buddhism accounts for suffering as the very stuff of existence made conscious. Suffering is such because we are aware of it. But not just human consciousness is aware of suffering, for everything with consciousness is aware of pain and suffers. Thus to the Jain even kicking a rock as we go walking along is a bad thing because the rock (or the spirit that gives it form) will suffer, even if the relatively inert material does not. All destruction and change represent this deeper process of suffering.

Pantheism is not a traditional philosophy (although elements appear in ancient thought) because it does not offer an account of being, suffering, existence, time, change, and impermanence. Even traditional mythology and religion know that these are the key issues. But neither is pantheism a modern philosophy animated by logic, reason, science, and imagination. Pantheism’s postmodern resurrection in New Age and perennial thinking attempts to bridge science and mysticism, to provide an avenue to appreciating the universe. But without the emotional and aesthetic elements, pantheism strains optimism, though it provides shelter to solitude and the sense of alienation resulting from the shortcomings of institutional creeds.

The Christian (and other) Gnostics foresaw the shortcomings of pantheism on the essential question of suffering. Without a resolution of the issue of suffering (along the same lines as Buddhism), metaphysics is irrelevant to daily existence. The Gnostics concluded that divinity could not be found in nature, that nature was intrinsically flawed, that suffering was built-into existence and nature — irrationally, haphazardly, and cruelly.

The divine must be in a different place, argued the Gnostics, not intersecting with what we call nature. The world or the universe was the product of a demi-urge, not a god or God, for such a vale of suffering could not possibly harbor divinity or divine intelligence, could not possibly be the brainchild of a benevolent and loving being. Pantheism was an impossibly wrong interpretation, a Gnostic might argue, an aesthetic pleasure projected on the universe, simply a divinely subjective experience.

However, because of its optimistic intuition, pantheism might yet be redirected to the Gnostic point of view. We look upon the beautiful in nature and call it divine, but in fact we look upon beautiful shadows at the back of Plato’s cave. We have only to recognize that they are shadows, though full of hints.

The realm of the Good can only be far, far, away, in what the Gnostics called the pleroma, with only intimations of God’s aspects reaching us as aeons. Jung called the pleroma everything and nothing, what cannot be spoken of. Perhaps the precious aeons are the chance elements we experience as indicators of the distant forms, as fingers pointing to an unseen moon. Even if pantheism does not account for everything, perhaps it accounts for just enough to keep us hopeful of enlightenment, or at least content with the awe of that which is before us.

Polish writer I. L. Peretz wrote a little tale titled “The Hermit and The Bear.” The story is a Yiddish folk tale, a little morality tale, that begins: “Once there was a man who could not abide evil.”

The man owned a little shop and turned it over to his wife while he occupied a room of the house to study the Torah and Kaballah and to pray. But even here was evil. So he decided to become a hermit. The man left his home and went to live in a corner of the synagogue. But even here was evil. People came and went and talked, so the hermit decided to go searching for a city that had no evil but couldn’t find one. So the hermit gave up civilization and traveled to forests, hills, and valleys, searching out a good habitation far from evil. He settled by the bank of a river.

But even by the riverbank there was evil. The water rushed and ran wild, overturning trees and flooding the land. And the fish and creatures were at constant war with one another. “So hermit has no peace and cannot sleep. As for running away — there’s no place left to run.” The hermit concludes that he won’t go searching any further and that evil occurs “because the soul of the world is asleep.”

The hermit’s logic is that when people are asleep they have no order or control over themselves. Their limbs may go here and there because the soul is asleep and not awake and present to control things. (Peretz doesn’t mention dreaming; his hermit is a simple soul.) Similarly, the world thrashes about because the soul of the world is asleep.

The hermit, in short, figures out that to awaken the soul of the world he must meditate and avoid every distraction such as a crow cawing or a bird singing, and meditate especially at night. But the river-spirit learns of what he is doing and seethes and roars and floods, disrupting the hermit’s concentration. He does not want to leave his new-found place and search for a place by a quieter river. Evil is everywhere, after all. Now, the hermit has learned a few spells in his reading and thinking, and after more fasting and meditation he goes out ready to tame the river. The hermit pronounces a holy spell and now the river is in a serious rage. It hurls a mighty wave at the hermit.

The wave turns into a bear, a “hairy black bear with bloodshot eyes” and the bear runs around “roaring and snarling, interfering with the hermit’s meditations.”

The hermit decides to quiet the bear. He goes out and sees the bear raging about, and when the hermit looks at him the bear falls, seething and foaming angrily. But the hermit looks at the bear with loving-kindness.

And there’s a war between the two sets of eyes — the hermit’s brimming with love and pity, the bear’s filled with hatred and rage. But the hermit’s eyes are strong. Slowly, slowly, they begin to conquer those of the bear.

And at last, the bear comes humbly to the hermit with a look in his eyes as if to submit peacefully to his wisdom, to be his humblest servant. And the hermit looks tenderly upon the bear and lovingly caresses him.

And so the hermit is ready to return peacefully to his thoughts and meditations, to think on what more he needs in order to awaken the soul of the world.

But there is nothing left for him to think. He himself no longer possess his former soul, because in the same measure that the bear has ascended to him, he has descended to the bear.

He sense a weariness in all his limbs: his eyelids grow heavy. Falteringly, he goes to his bed, and the bear follow him and lies down beside him.

There is no end to evil. The bear has become partly human, and the human partly a bear. And a saint who lies down with a bear cannot awaken the soul of the world.

Chet Raymo’s recent book will remind the reader a little of Andre Comte-Sponville, except that Raymo’s provocative title, When God is Gone, Everything is Holy, is intended to argue for atheism as natural rationalism or rational naturalism, except that Raymo does not succeed in softening it, though that is his purpose. The two writers are similar in their Catholic backgrounds, both admitting a nostalgia for candles and rituals; Raymo was educated at Notre Dame University and spent his career teaching science at two Catholic universities.

In the title chapter, Raymo muses about Catholicism turning into “religious naturalism” — his softening of the title blow. Comte-Spoonville has no such illusions. Both are stanch supporters of modern Western society and its values, biases, and illusions. That reverse triumphalism seems to be the political style of apologists for what must be called scientism.

Religious naturalism is the term Raymo assigns to his own belief, the atheism of his career of science, which he hopes to make palatable with an agenda wherein Catholic tradition renounces its doctrines and embraces something akin to his own beliefs. For readers interested in this sort of modern quasi-religious apologia, the attraction will be to similar-minded Catholics only, for that is where it seems to occur almost exclusively. For non-Catholics, the personal agenda is less obvious. Raymo’s book ranges from active hostility gradually softened over the course of short chapters to end in Catholic name-dropping from Columbanus to Duns Scotus to Thomas Merton to Teilhard de Chardin. Seen from this perspective, the book is too confessional to provide value outside its targeted clique.

But there are larger issues.

Raymo’s chief gaff, as with most apologists of scientism, is the failure to see that reason and science operate within the same human social and cultural context as religion. Both are products of such contexts, and science does not transcend human foibles. Furthermore, science thrives on its byproduct: technology. In technology one finds a representative measure of human ingenuity, because technology represents the totality of effort behind both reason (as logic or capability) and society or politics. Technology, from the club and spear to the atomic bomb, is an inevitable brainchild of a science that has no ethical bounds. Scientists themselves bristle at such bounds, dismissing them as epistemological bounds and refusing to acknowledge that their work is culturally-based. The selective criteria scientist apply to their projects is largely motivated by the cultural values they hold and the political (in the widest sense) context of their times.

Reason cannot manufacture or analyze itself. Reason is the product of the imagination, as Wittgenstein noted. Reason as scientific method is the application of one fragment of mental capability. Apologists of scientism elevate that fragment to the status of absolute. Absolutes have a tendency to be intolerant, whether it is Yahweh or Reason. B. F. Skinner, a relentless champion of scientism, is the representative denyer of evidence outside the paradigm of science. Such was the application of an unfettered empiricism coached by the political winds of the day.

Who can doubt that science and technology have created wonders? But what better wonders if they had an ethical basis? And who can doubt the good that religion would do if it had an ethical basis, too, even if we acknowledge the epistemological and psychological issues. Science and religion are bound to clash, but even when they do not clash they shed blood.

Science and religion — and the clash of science and religion — shed blood perhaps not because they are intrinsically extreme or because they ought to adhere to ethics — and ethics that would also have to come from society and culture. Both shed blood because both have the tendency, indeed, trajectory, to become absolute.

Religious wars, whether tribal or national, are obvious products of the worse human instincts. But these wars employ the weapons that are the obvious products of science and technology. For science to make an absolute of reason when reason does not exist outside of random and pragmatic expressions or as mechanisms of social order, consensus, consumption, and the like, is as much a folly as any religious dogmatism — or, rather, in line with them as human expressions. The argument that, well, at least science does not kill people, is not true.

Raymo accelerates his arguments slowly, starting with easy targets: popular superstitions, Romantic poets, New Age ideas, alternative medicine. With the last, for example, Raymo reveals his defense of established power in the fields of science and technology. To Raymo, modern medicine is sacrosanct; he ignores the corrupt relationship between its players, from medical to pharmaceutical to agri-business to corporate producers of toxins and pollutants, a ring of well-protected and well-concealed power bases that selectively fund whatever agenda of “science” they want to present. Or one might cite the tight economic circle binding military merchants, weapons manufacturers, politicians, scientists — all taking advantage of the latest technology, economic profits, and human suffering.

By ignoring the political and economic context of science and technology, Raymo ignores the inherent weakness of human reason and scientific objectivity: that they are not based on reason or objectivity. By ignoring the issue, he becomes an unwitting apologist for an irrationally-driven social and cultural system.

We can see this tendency, too, when Raymo marvels at the wonders of technology while writing on his laptop in an idyllic Bahamas setting. How could anybody ever live in a world “without knowledge of the galaxies and the DNA?” he says. As a matter of fact, most of the world probably does. Only the elites of power, using science and technology to craft their weapons, and well versed in such knowledge.

So by the time we get to the book’s title chapter, it is too late to find the Catholic nostalgia much of a redeeming factor. Though Raymo wants to call himself a religious naturalist or an agnostic, the title gives away what the left brain insists upon, even if the right brain wants to salvage the dregs of childhood. “When God is gone everything is holy,” says Raymo, but not by any criteria of science or reason. Raymo turns Liebnitz on his head, or, rather, turns himself upside down, claiming that we live in the best of all possible worlds after all.